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The Glow The Glow
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Illustration by Marek Raczkowski
Nature

The Glow

Urszula Zajączkowska
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Urszula Zajączkowska:
A poet, artist and botanist. As a scientist, she researches the anatomy, biomechanics and aerodynamics of plants. As a visual artist, she creates short films. She has published two volumes of poetry: “Atomy” and “Minimum”. Some call her a conscious poet of nature.

“The plant glues it all together and energizes it, weaving it with the wave of rays pouring in. A living body is created – new leaves and, right away, green shoots. All of them want to live, to create themselves. Their April hunger is overwhelming for a person dragged out of the winter light deficiency,” says biologist and poet Urszula Zajączkowska, as she takes us for a walk through the spring-time woods.

Yet despite it all, it’s quiet. I can’t hear a thing, although over there (so not exactly here, from a distant star) a white light spreads out across the universe, reaching as far as here and hitting my skin. All of this happens soundlessly, and it doesn’t cause me any pain either. 15 million kilometres from here, hydrogen in the sun boils at 15 million degrees Celsius. Oh, look at all the warmth radiating from that nuclear gurgle! Look at the shots of shining photons, as they chase through the icy darkness, unsettled. Look! Now they are fleeing the glowing heat. They pull away from its body, in a hurricane of fire, in flaming blasts. They’ll soon be here; in a moment they will light up the globe with a pale blue glow. And that’s how cosmic light establishes the day for us. I open the door. Splinters of the sun hit my eye.

Light is described as a stream of mutually-induced bundles of energy. Sometimes I can really understand it in that way. Just as inhaling

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Urszula Zajączkowska:
A poet, artist and botanist. As a scientist, she researches the anatomy, biomechanics and aerodynamics of plants. As a visual artist, she creates short films. She has published two volumes of poetry: “Atomy” and “Minimum”. Some call her a conscious poet of nature.
Translation: Mark Ordon
Publish date: 22.03.2019

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Urszula Zajączkowska
Urszula Zajączkowska:
A poet, artist and botanist. As a scientist, she researches the anatomy, biomechanics and aerodynamics of plants. As a visual artist, she creates short films. She has published two volumes of poetry: “Atomy” and “Minimum”. Some call her a conscious poet of nature.

The panicked scream of human beings emerging from the water at the very beginning of terrestrial life must mean something. Why do we cry so desperately at the precise moment of transition from an aquatic environment to a gaseous one; when we take our first breath of air into our empty lungs?

Air, as a diffuse form of matter, is so light and soft it’s enough to simply inhale, to take in, to directly exchange whole molecules with our bloody and wet interior: oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water. That unbearable lightness of air causes a number of land-dwelling lifeforms real problems through a phenomenon, one might call magical, although in fact—excusez le mot—is quite physical. 

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