Rain

Rain

The whole day we’ve worked on my house. Shergil and Giorgi put in a plastic ceiling in my kitchen, it looks great. I worked to fill in the holes in the floor and windows with some expandable foam, and the girls did a huge job washing the entire kitchen and all the dishes. It has been uncharacteristically rainy for July, heavy downpours over the last three days.

During a lull in the rain this afternoon, we took a walk out through the mists along the fortress wall, down through the gate to the park, walking along the trees looking down through the leaves to the valley floor.

We went through another arch and entered the old Sighnaghi graveyard, passing pictures of men smirking, old women staid and stoic, young men by their cars, and forlorn young girls, one who died at age fifteen. That has to be the worst time to die, fifteen years old. A tradition of preserving people’s images by laser printing their portraits onto gravestones became popular in the Communist era. Walking through a graveyard in Georgia is eerie because you read not just the names, but see the pictures as well.

A small church stands on the peninsula of the graveyard, standing brick orange against a backdrop of green, the mountains across the miles invisible in the haze.

We were quiet mostly, and spent a few minutes in the church when we arrived. The acoustics were boomy, but for a single voice, it echoed nicely. I sang gamshvenebuli Aghdgomasa Shensa, Gelati school, first voice, hearing three voices. We marched on, passing trumpet vines, thistles in bloom, and the trash of a construction crew working on a new gravesite.

At the end of the road, the end of the peninsula, the land drops away for hundreds of feet on three sides, into a white void. At times the cloud rushed up at us, other times it receded and we glimpsed green fields far below, or a patch of a village. Silence except for the rustle of small birds in the bushes, and the constant stirring of air, muffling itself.

Tonight we sat on the balcony, listening to Hamlet Gonashvili, -greatest of the 1960-1980s era Georgian singers, staring at a double candle flame, and saying toasts: to happy memories, to all our close friends, to our siblings, and friends like siblings, and for the inspiration to live life fully, close to the land, close to our hearts, and full of love. The rain poured down, and the rattle on the tin roof overhead relaxed away the accumulated noise of the city, the smog of auditory pollution, the rushing and toiling and jostling in the streets… until nothing was left except the dull soaking of the roof overhead, and the slightest hint of a fresh mud smell caught on the ounce of breeze passing between us.

To Love

Love

July 5, 2006

A friend said this evening, ‘I don’t know where my heart is. I thought I left it in Georgia, but now that I’ve returned, I can’t find it….’
It made me think that love must be two ways. Even if one feels a burning love for something or someone that seems not to return that love, still there must be some reciprocation, no? As I kid, I wanted nothing more than to spend my evenings quietly organizing my baseball cards, by player, by team, by statistics, by year…. I loved those players, those cards, and those numbers. But it wasn’t really them I loved, it was the experience of participating in their game, of feeling organized, of feeling like I was learning something interesting; it was these experiences that fed me in return.

Now I am completely obsessed with Georgian chant. Every day I love it more, I can’t get enough. Today, with three guests, we tracked down the Zedashe rehearsal in the Sighnaghi church, where they were standing around a podium in the dark, overcast light, singing medieval chant. They weren’t sight reading a new piece, or reworking a section that had been going wrong recently, they were chanting. They were singing the words, purely, simply, without effort, singing not for perfection, but to praise something beyond themselves. The mood is different from a concert, there is no anxiety, no desire to perform, no tension.

My mood was different today. Usually, I’m all ready to sing chants, so by habit I went straight up and joined in with the basses, but I felt more like a guest today, more like a listener. I stepped back into the acoustic of the church to listen and appreciate, not my friends chant, but the sound of the ages; the sound of chant being given in praise to God in a space created for praise to God.

I’ve never wanted to sing just for singing sake, I really want to sing for joy, for love, which, simply put, means for God.

Since leaving the church, we’ve had a beautiful evening, and I’ve had a non-stop soundtrack of chants going through my head, over and over. I am a radio station from the middle ages. Someone please send in a request for the Beatles or something….

Love is two ways. One can’t expect Georgia to just provide love, one must somehow find a place to participate in that love. One must reciprocate love, invest in projects, in people, engage with a full heart, and not dwell in expectations of what was or what one expected. Love comes when I am open minded, strong in pace and task, meeting the world with my hope and strength, not when I expect something, or feel empty hearted from lack of understanding or support.

Sikharuls gaumarjos, siqvaruls gaumarjos. To happiness, and to love, they are forever tied together (Giorgi Chkheidze).

Georgian Moment

Georgian Moment


I went down to the Philharmonia to meet my friend John for a beer and game of chess. We took the underground passage to a nearby park, and sat down on yellow plastic lawn chairs in front of a beer stand. After talking for awhile, John pulled out his chessboard and we began to set up pieces.

Right away, an intoxicated man from the next table came over and said in English, “my friend wants to play!” I said, no, no, but John said, okay. Of course he meant he would play the winner of our game.

We started our game and periodically another man would peer over to check our progress. John mentioned that the building at the edge of the park was a chess tournament hall, so no telling who could be drinking a beer out here. I think most chess Grandmasters have come from Russia, -that is for men, but Georgia has the most female Grandmasters in the world. Certainly, there is a large chess culture here, and we had no idea if a hidden talent waited to kick our butts.

Once, when I took a few minutes to make a key move, our onlooker said, no, no, no! You must do this! And he showed me another move that lead to a new sequence of outcomes. But after studying this series of developments, John and I realized it wasn’t a very strong recommendation. I said, ‘who is playing here, me or you?’ in my finely acquired Georgian street belligerence. He backed off a little. Very bad form to nose into someone else’s chess game.

But when the game ended, he wanted to be friends. Irakli was the name. He sat down with us at the table, and in very amiable English wanted to know where we were from, how long we had been in Georgia, whether we liked it… the usual questions. He mentioned that he was a singer, and wanted to know if we knew any songs. I hesitated to affirm because I was still skeptical of someone who had very clearly crossed the boundaries of etiquette when observing a public chess game: silence! But eventually I let on that I was also interested in Georgian singing.

Before we knew it, he had me singing with him, and we went through three songs there in the park. Later, I said my main interest was in sacred music, and he said, ‘oh, my good friend is a chanter, do you know Tamaz at the Conservatory?’ Of course I know Tamaz. So he whipped out his cell phone, called Tamaz, and yelled excitedly into the receiver, ‘guess who I’ve met? One American named Joni who knows Georgian songs pretty well, do you know him?’ Then I talked to Tamaz, and it was settled, we were true Georgian buddies: we had drunk together, sung together and, most importantly, we had mutual acquaintances in important places!

Irakli wanted us to stay and drink more, but we declined. Leaving, John and I laughed about how absolutely Georgian the experience had been. We’re both going to miss the spontaneity and warmth of this place; the everyday experiences.