I’ve been thinking an essay.
Or maybe the essay has been thinking itself within me — during long runs, quick showers, annoying red lights. Splitting the nuclei of draft paragraphs. Weeding out the non-sequiturs from loose outlines. Sharpening the contours from the mind’s blur.

It begins with the thought of seasons and their cycles — how they condition us, how they acquaint us with the light, the air, the temperature, the humidity of the places we’ve lived in. You know exactly what I mean: that one bike ride in the evening that says unambiguously: November has arrived. That one overcast dawn that screams: It’s May again!

And in that cycle, you feel unchanged. Or maybe you feel like you yourself have seasons.
But in the background of returning seasons, you change — so slowly that the change barely registers. And when it does occasionally register, you realize it’s not a circle.
It’s a spiral with unevenly growing pitch.

This thought has been sharpening its contours. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was thinking a poem by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński. I decided to translate it — not because I think I can do it justice, but because in its poetic vagueness it captures this feeling far better than I can. And while the poem is doing its capturing, I’ll try to think of a way to lock it in a single word.

"The Unfolding of Changes"

At dawn, I come upon fledglings
like the feathered fruit of silence.
Who was I, growing out of the cloud?
Who am I, darkening like soil?

Each year I unfold and descend into snow,
each year I close — and rise, a tree,
to carry a leaf to the sky’s edge
and fall — a tone turned into cloudburst.

Each year I unfold and I seal the dream in earth.
I wrap my furred heart in dandelion down,
and I am silent, like the green apple of change,
silent unchanged in storms — stillness in motion.