GEORGIA ON MY MIND

(The sweet insanity of traveling during the pandemic)

A strange week-long quarantine in a Freedom Square hotel. 3 meals a day delivered to your door. A month in one of the most unseen and magical places on earth. Tbilisi's quirky ambiance, empty of everyone and everything but bakeries and flower shops, ghost police cars, memories of past celebrations.

String lights like fallen stars in the mist-cloaked night, and a hallucinogenic balloon rising out of the Mtkvari river for Orthodox Christmas. Church bells ricocheting across the valley shrouded figures emerging for a masked midnight mass in Holy Trinity Cathedral. Grandmothers leading sleepy little girls into prayer. I watch phantom rockets blazing across the night sky from my Airbnb and think of Johnny Cash.

Released from the tinderbox of despair, you revel in the divine decadence of khachapuri and eggplant elevated to poetry, food of the Gods; unpretentious, great wine in unmarked bottles from rough vineyards sold everywhere- in churches and vegetable shacks and on the roadside. Hosts in chalets who haven't seen guests for a year offer you candle-lit feasts in lonely hamlets, happy to receive, relieved the plague might be over, bringing out rare whiskies from Belarus, shaking their heads when they find you are from the USA. Fathers and daughters breaking into song over salguni cheese, olives, and bread from a 300-year-old oven.

The silence centers you in magnificent remote monasteries and forgotten cathedrals strewn across the hills like tiny black jewels. Driving through villages hidden in the shadows of mountains, scenes of squalor and splendor emerge from lost dreams and Soviet nightmares. Watching Americans attack our temple of democracy on my iPhone as a monk sweeps the Iqalto church floor near Telavi, sadness circles above me like a murder of crows.

Stretches of crystalline beauty from Turkey to Russia, Armenia to Azerbaijan, their faces, tongues and tastes, architecture and histories bleeding across borders, staining the sky, fermenting into song and dance and liquor. The Ottoman remains of Akhaltsikhe, built around the Rabati castle, a village split by a flirtatious young river, its haunted frozen streets shining gold in tungsten light, reminding you of Kashmir. The long-gone place, not the song.

The Mediterranean seduction of Kakheti beckons you, with its lovely cigar-smoking hostess, Eka, gifting you bottles of her delicious Zenishi blend, where Saperavi grapes burst with light and dark, and the roads undulate into the gorgeous wild ski slopes of Kazbegi. Trapped by an avalanche in the Rooms Hotel, you surrender to beauty and chance and stare at the ancient Gergeti monastery that you will climb tomorrow, up the steep, snow-clad slopes, to pray for something you cannot remember. The wind whips you to your knees while monks fervently pray for love and make wine in the basement. Who can find you here?

You collect your breakfast of potatoes, eggs, salguni, and khachapuri from young Mariam with the searchlight eyes and park next to a newly-woken stream of diamonds and water; you watch Mount Kazbeg shield you from the conspiratorial sky. The red neon cross on the corner flickers in the morning light. You total your losses and throw them into the stream. You listen to the glorious nothing of the valley and eat your eggs.

Rescued in cable cars, swinging precariously across deathly slopes, you make new friends- a customs agent from the Russian border, an elderly priest, and a techno musician fleeing Berlin- new points of view on the madness of our times.

Unwritten mythologies immortalized in "The Color of Pomegranates," and the unseen masterpieces of Parajanov and Iosseliani explode your mind. You were frozen by months of poison and violence on TV watched in isolation, a refugee from dreaming. Spring might break free soon.

Your imagination unfurls like the flag up on the green wooden balcony of the elderly lady who waves you a daily greeting as you walk down Shava Dadiani street in the shy early morning light, emboldened by Turkish coffee. Greeted by Gerges, smiling as he hands you apples, oranges, coriander, tomatoes, handling a garland of dried persimmons as if it was a queen's necklace.

Thoughts of Pushkin appear and disappear into alleyways on Rustavelli street, and you realize how moved you are by Georgia's people. Those who illegally opened their bars and restaurants for sumptuous illicit meals and medicinal gulps of chacha in the bitter cold. The DJs and artists who hosted you at home for dinner and an impromptu party in a loft. The baker you befriended who gave you bread for free when you didn't have the one lari in change. The vintner who picked you up so you could sample her wines in the country. A smiling little girl who volunteered to find you the biggest, freshest khachapuri in the neighborhood. The driver who ferried you across town in the curfewed night to catch your lonely pre-dawn flight. Kindness and generosity. Savage pride. A belief the country can transcend corruption and poverty and break from the shackles of its history. The rugged, unpopular view that the world can rise from hate and inequality.

I came here to finish a film but returned with an encyclopedia of inspiration. I share these photos so you can know a bit of Georgia and travel there one day when we have tamed the pandemic and returned to the sky, free to dream again.