Fulgurite Lightning Shard.

A storm passes over the dunes, a bolt strikes the sand, and in less time than the flash takes to fade, the sand turns to glass. What remains is this: a pale, root-shaped tube of fused sand, rough and gritty outside, glassy and smooth as poured wax down its hollow center. Its branching shape traces the exact, unrepeatable path the current cut underground.

A strike can exceed eighteen hundred degrees, hot enough to melt silica sand into glass along the channel the current follows toward the ground. Naturalists of the eighteenth century, meeting these strange glass roots for the first time, called them petrified lightning. Older belief held that struck ground and struck wood carried a charge that would not strike twice in the same place, and a fragment was kept afterward as a kind of ward: sympathetic magic in its plainest form.

Details

• Natural fulgurite: sand fused by lightning
• From a wind-scoured dune field in the American Southwest, where fulgurites surface after storms and are gathered, never dug for
• Light for its size; each piece is shaped by its own strike

How to use

Set it upright in a dish of its own, or simply hold it. There is no correct way to display a frozen instant of weather.

Only the quiet wonder of having one.