Today I Skyped with Tskalsminda Georgia. They rang from Nona
magazia (shop) on the corner down the mountain road on the highway. I could
smell the fish, feel the damp and hear the warm clang of bells as the cows
meandered home. All gazed into the computer, brown eyes light to in the
afternoon sun in the wee village near the Black Sea.
All was the same, there in the place where time is measured
by birth, death and seasons. Achievements are not the rubric, possessions not
the bar. Alms once paid in full to the priest assure their entree into
heaven. Peace reigned. It was the complacency
of people whose country is so small that they are only pawns or hosts on the
world stage.
A new government
with affiliations with Putin has recently been voted into power. They refer to
themselves as the dream team. But the capital is far away from the agrarian
world of Tskaltsminda.
I looked at Nona and
Nana and Tatia. All were perched on the little stools at the shops where less
than a year ago I had sat eating sunflower seeds roasted on the propane burner
that was used for all cooking.
All seemed the same, Nana dreams of a house with her
husband, with a shower. She dreams of a place of her own. She had dreamed this
dream for a time now. Yet still she trudges across muddy tracks to her babbias
house where her grandmothers wood burning stove is the source of food, heat and
water, and the out door Georgian toilet is a hole in the ground across a frozen
field.
Nona has given a facelift to her shop. The tongues of the
fishmongers still wag about her box blonde hair and her Beyonce build. Nona has
more than most. But she dreams too. She dreams of a red dress, with such sway
that she will be swept up in love that will take her away from winters drudge
of a shop on the highway.
I once dreamed of living on a farm somewhere in the long ago
of life. I must have dreamed myself into
this village. I was in areal time version of Lerner and Lowe Brigadoon. It was
a time warp, a land of many kisses and much illusion..
The sun had not even announced her presence here in Michigan
when I chatted through the cyber window to my far away loves, in that far away
land.
I just wanted to follow the dark head east and go home, home
again to that land.
I was cold there. I was hungry there. I was very isolated. I
was in some place that only years in a temple, of fasting and penitence can
surrender a soul to such supplication.
My life here is all shadow boxing, with the world and with
my own demons.
In that land I lost
my bravado and got softly grown to a new form.
Now it is near a year
that I have been back . By most standards I have been dormant. No great travel,
no great love, no new notch on life’s achievement rubric. I have been spared
any great drama. All quiet on this western front.
Today I miss them and
my village so much so that a waft of that village fills my senses. I smell the
sea and the snow on the mountain and the smell of green wood as it burns to
mask cold with the pop of the fire.
We live our lives,
from event to event. We look for meaning, purpose.
I can seize onto the
most mundane chores to give me a sense of intention. It leaves me
undernourished.
The soundtrack of Georgia lingers in me. I think of all my writing
trying to capture and catalogue that life.
Now it is a year
later.
I am quieter somehow.
What is the tattoo that Georgia left on my soul?
I do not ask this question.
I do not want to feel
this deep stir that says I am far away from home.
All was stripped
there.
Everything that was life’s
ordinariness went randomly missing. Water, heat, language, food, even the
season was nothing like what I had lived before.
The constants the moon, the sun and the stars hid behind mountains
and or the bey of wood dogs that left me housebound.
I would sit in the
cacophony of the house, the family noise, the village boys, the constant clamor
of Georgian TV and I would sit close to the stove, fingering through warn pages
of Willa Cather novels, or just watch as toothless babias would chat about the
citizens of the village, or their spouse.
I was alone. But aloneness in that land made sense; it was
not laden with expectations.
Now here, it is a cold month. My heat spills out all toasty,
soup cooks on the stove, media is at my fingertips, my children’s voices are a
tap away on a bells and whistle iPhone.
I am not happier. I am not more settled.
But what has she given me this blessed Mother Georgia?
I just want to live
how I did there. I want to play with the village children, and take long weekend
walk abouts and climb mountains to monasteries, and think how from the
beginning of time we loved God. I want to sit in a chill and warm myself with
Turkish coffee and not be concerned with the next moment.
The theme, common
theme we all spoke of there was the randomness of life there.
Life is not random here. I am far from the moments where we
just live the yeses.
I am script writing again, peeling scabs off bruises, and
shadowboxing with old demons.
Oh beloved Mother
Georgia. You bequeathed me this gift whose name I do not yet know. I intuit it;
it leaves an aura on my vision.
When all was done,
when the food went, went the light went, when there really was only one candle,
when my beloved house child ruptured love with his violations of trust, the
smell of the incense hurled itself up my nostril and Mary icons piercing brown
eyes burned to me I was living the beginning.
The beginning of life
before we could access so much noise.
I had to believe in
the mystery and again and again it was reveled to me.
Some days I think I
dreamed the place. It was so surreally real that my knowing of it was from some
place in me that is barely tangible.
When I go home there in a mind movie I travel up to the
cloister that sits on the mountaintop above Batumi, in the clouds with the
Black Sea shimmering in the distance and I am a holy sister, who lives only to
love God. I see myself all garbed in a habit, walking about hearing the prayer
wails rise to heaven from the valley below. I am gods stewardess spurring them
upward with my own prayer so that they might reach is ears.
And that is all I know …
And when I think of Georgia and how it left me…it leaves me
in the bittersweet of a thwarted love affair. Yet though cast aside knows in
the end her soul mate will return. One day…
I am not really changed, but just more myself. I do not push
so hard against the oppression of silence, the dance of loved ones or my own
nature. So Gamajos to all man, all good.