The Heart in Glass: A Valentine's Meditation

 

 

" I circle the walls of the house of Layla, Sometimes I kiss this wall, sometimes I kiss that one, It is not love for these walls that has infatuated my heart, But the love of who lives within them."

أطوف على جدار ديار ليلى"
" أقبل ذا الجدار و ذا الجدارا و ما حب الديار شغفن قلبي ولكن حب من سكن الديارا

 

Dear Reader,

The heart shape we recognize today the one on every love letter didn't start as a symbol of love at all. It began as a seed.

 

 

The silphium plant grew wild along the North African coast near ancient Cyrene, so precious that the city stamped its heart-shaped seedpod onto their coins. This Mediterranean plant was worth its weight in silver. By the first century AD, it had been harvested into extinction. The last stalk reportedly went to Emperor Nero, who ate it. And so the heart shape outlived the plant that inspired it becoming the symbol we know today.

Before it meant romance, the heart shape appeared as ivy leaves in medieval manuscripts, as water lily petals in heraldry. In Japan, the same form was called inome the eye of a wild boar carved into sword guards to ward off spirits. The heart, it seems, has always been a shape that protects.

The Heart That Wasn't

Here's something curious: for centuries, we've been drawing the heart upside down.

In the 13th century, in a French manuscript called Roman de la Poire (Romance of the Pear), a lover kneels and offers his beloved what we now recognize as a heart. But scholars debate whether it was meant to be a pear. The shape resembles a pine cone held upside down, matching how medieval physicians described the actual organ. It wasn't until the 15th century that the heart took its current form wide at top, pointed below.

We've been getting it anatomically wrong for generations. And yet it works perfectly. Perhaps because love itself is rarely accurate it's a feeling that lives in the body but refuses to be confined by it.

Of Valentines

 

The origins of Valentine's Day are multiple, contested, delightfully murky. There were at least two Saint Valentines martyred on February 14th in the third century. One legend tells of priests who performed secret marriages when they were forbidden. Another speaks of love notes written from prison.

But before any saint claimed the day, there was Lupercalia an ancient Roman festival in mid-February involving rituals we won't detail here, but let's just say it was considerably less sentimental than our modern celebrations. It also involved a matchmaking lottery where men drew women's names from a jar.

It wasn't until the Middle Ages that February 14th became definitively romantic. Chaucer wrote in The Parliament of Fowls about how birds choose their mates on Saint Valentine's Day, believing it marked the start of spring's mating season. The Normans had their own celebration called "Galatin's Day" galatin meaning "lover of women." The holidays merged, their histories bleeding together like colors in glass.

Before Europe Spoke of Love: The East Had Already Written Its Epic

 

Layla and Majnun, Iran, 16th century, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

While medieval Europe was just beginning to carve heart shapes into manuscripts, the Middle East had been perfecting the art of love poetry for centuries.

In 7th century Arabia, a young Bedouin named Qays ibn al-Mulawwah loved a girl named Layla. When her family forbade their union, Qays wandered into the desert, writing her name in the sand, reciting poetry to the wind. They called him Majnun "the mad one" Majnun Layla, crazy for Layla. The story became known as the Arabian Romeo and Juliet, ending with both dying in 688, where legend says Qays was found lying next to Layla's grave.

The Majnun and Layla story traveled. It appeared in Persian poetry, in Sufi mysticism (where earthly love became a metaphor for divine longing), in Turkish literature, in Indian verse. Love poetry in Arabic called ghazal had been thriving since pre-Islamic times, when poets gathered at trade fairs to recite verses about longing and loss.

By the time Chaucer was connecting Valentine's Day to romance in 14th century England, Persian poet Hafiz (1315-1390) was writing ghazals so exquisite they're still recited across the Middle East today. His Divan contains about 500 ghazals combining mystical themes with sensual imagery. The Persian poet Rumi (1207-1273) wrote over 25,000 verses exploring divine love, heartbreak, and spiritual awakening.

Courtly love as Europe knew it "love for love's sake" and "exaltation of the beloved" was traced back to 9th and 10th century Arabic literature. The philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna) wrote a treatise on love in the 11th century. The medieval European troubadours? They learned from Arabic poetry during the Islamic presence in Spain.

Love in the Levant: Songs from Palestinian Soil

Painting by Sliman Mansour

And closer to home, where our Heart Vase is made, folk songs have been carrying love and longing for generations.

Traditional Palestinian songs called ataaba consist of four verses where the first three end with the same word meaning three different things, and the fourth verse concludes. Farmers sang them in fields. Women sang them at weddings, during henna ceremonies, while collecting water from springs. The improvised poetry allowed each singer to express their own heart.

Palestinian folk songs encompass love songs, wedding anthems, and songs that reflect the collective subconscious of the people. There's dal'ona, sung during the dabke dance. There's sahja, performed at weddings with rhythmic clapping. There's zaghareet—those high, ululating calls that women offer at celebrations, each one a short improvised poem followed by a joyous trill.

In Palestinian weddings, love is communal. Women of the rural areas sing songs at the henna ceremony, wedding processionals called zeffat, and popular dance songs. The zajal a talented singer leads the sahja, improvising verses on the spot for the bride or groom. Each wedding becomes its own anthology of love poetry, never repeated exactly the same way twice.

This is the tradition our glassblowers in Jaba inherit. Not just the technical skill of shaping glass, but centuries of understanding that beauty is meant to be used, that craft serves life, that the everyday can hold poetry. The Heart Vase comes from this lineage where love is woven into work songs and harvest celebrations and the sound of women's voices rising together.

 

The Philosophy of the Heart Vase

 

Which brings us to glass.

Our Heart Vase is hand-blown and does not speak of perfection, quite the oppostie it is a proof of breath, of human hands, of the impossibility of identical when fire is involved.

The reflection shows you the heart differently than looking straight at it ever could.

This is what all good vessels do: they transform what they hold.

Love Through Glass

A surrealist artwork by Canadian artist Gab Bois

Love works through glass reflections, too. You never see it straight. It's always filtered through shadows, memories, hope, the stories you've inherited about what love should look like. The Heart Vase makes this visible. 

An Invitation

 

This Valentine's Day, think beyond the binary. Beyond coupled and single, romantic and unromantic. Think about all the forms love takes: the friend who knows your coffee order, hands that shaped your understanding of care, art that makes you feel less alone, strangers who hold doors, landscapes that hold you when nothing else can.

Buy yourself a flower. Place it the Heart Vase. Notice how glass catches light, how water shifts perspective, how the same stem look different depending on where you stand.

Because here's what history teaches: the heart shape came from growing things. From seeds and leaves and plants that could be loved into extinction if we weren't careful. Love is a living thing too. It needs tending. It changes with seasons. It reflects light differently at different angles.

The Heart Vase, with its handmade irregularities and asymmetries, reminds us: love doesn't need perfection. It needs presence. It needs to be breathed into being and held up to light.

So here's to all the hearts: botanical, symbolic, anatomical. To silphium and secret marriages, to Lupercalia and lovebirds, to Victorian lace and medieval manuscripts to Arabic poetry. To the heart-shaped vessel on your table, holding whatever you give it roses or weeds, memory or hope, love in all its stubborn, surprising forms.

Pour the water. Arrange the stems. Let glass do what it does best: transform into something worth lingering over.

The Heart Vase

Hand-blown by our glassblowers in Jaba using centuries-old techniques. Made entirely without molds. Each piece unique its curves, depth, the way it catches light all shaped by human breath and inherited skill.

In the Ornamental world love hides away from perfection and reveals itself through holding space for beauty, for breath, for light finding its way through glass.

Explore the Heart Vase

With love,
Lameice