The A and Ω haiku*
profound silence soars —
thirty charged voices starkly
break into church hymn
(albs_t)
*XVIII International Festival of Orthodox Church Music is taking place at Białystok Philharmonic. It ends Sunday.
Arvo Part, Kanon Pokajanen, Ode III (mp3, 2.7MB)
Creative Minds T-shirt 2008
Here comes the summer, and with it, the return of the Global Village T-shirt, after an absence of eight years. This time we are offering a high quality black T-shirt with the logo printed in orange and grey, catch-phrase in white, down the front, plus the web address printed in white on the left sleeve. It comes in two styles – boys and girls, all sizes, as a limited edition series of 200. Once they’ve been sold, they won’t be reprinted.
The Creative Minds T-shirt is available at GV office and sells for 25 PLN. Contact Megi on 085 74 20 256.
Bundled spears of delight
Asparagus, the first vegetable that appears in the new season, doesn’t travel very well. If you resisted the temptation to buy any withered, tired-looking imported stuff earlier in spring, you are being rewarded at the moment. The Polish season for asparagus has just begun, but it won’t last long, just a month or so. To get some wholesome asparagus, avoid supermarket stalls, choose a small dedicated grocer, like the one in that hut a few steps down the street from Global Village. Spears should be fresh, firm to touch, plump and dump. Don’t mess around with asparagus, it deserves only simplest treatment.
Heat the oven to 200°C. Trim the woody ends and peel the stalks, the bleached variety need peeling, the green ones are just fine without. Toss the asparagus carefully in olive oil, sprinkle with coarse sea salt and place flat on a cast-iron griddle. Shove it into the oven and roast for about 20 minutes, or until the tips turn brown and a knife goes into the thick end with ease. When done, leave it to cool slightly. Eat with your fingers, with lots of thickly buttered fresh brown bread. A glass of bubbly does make a difference.
You might notice that asparagus makes your wee smell funny, but that’s the sign of how well it cleanses your system from within. Who cares when it is so good? Eat it as often as you can and watch your virility grow by the day.
The Tunnel of Light
In the early 2000s a teacher called Jason Walker came over from Florida to live in Białystok and became a member of Global Village team for a couple of years. We would go jogging together in Zwierzyniec first thing in the morning. Such a natural choice when you live a five-minute walk from this runners’ paradise. In a big city, like London, you need to be in Richmond or Hampstead to have instant access to similar expanses of parkland.
In Zwierzyniec, at the point where the main lane reaches the boulder commemorating the first flight over the Atlantic by a Pole, four other paths, like dials of a giant clock, branch off in different directions. One of them cuts diagonally to ulica 11 listopada as a long, straight, well-beaten passage, surrounded on both sides with a dense wood, like an aisle of the gothic church. The other end of it, just discernible, seems like a tiny whitish point dropped on the all-embracing green.
The moment Jason the Runner entered that impressive path, he coined a name for it, ‘We’re in the tunnel of light.’
It’s time The Tunnel had its due place in the archive of Global Village ideas, we’ve just added a special, out of the woods, category to this blog. To find out why The Tunnel of Light is a magic space and how it stimulates the mind and body, try the following: start running, frequently go to the woods, or visit both GV blogs.
Into the woods
