The Quill #5: Book Travel

This week, we are traveling again, but not to find the sights; instead to find wholeness.

NYC native Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love is a voyage of confronting the truth, finding importance, and forgiving mistakes. She invites readers to come along on the journey of a lifetime: a treasure hunt, the treasure being her true self. Gilbert’s recount of her travels is written so magically; she finds ways to articulate feelings and emotions, as well as describe smells, sounds, and tastes. Even though she struggles on this journey, as a reader, you find yourself jealous and envious.

“Eat” in Italy: Gilbert’s initial stop on her tour of life is Rome, Italy. It is here that she realizes that she, we Americans, unlike Italians, are unable to relax into pleasure completely and fully. She states that, “Americans don’t really know how to do nothing.” She learns an Italian phrase, “il bel far niente,” meaning the beauty of doing nothing. With that realization and a newly adopted mantra, she sets a goal — learn to do nothing! Having nothing but this goal, she starts on a new path in a foreign country. She vows to learn the language, experience the food, and immerse herself in the culture. First and foremost, the food! The Italians really know how to do it well — the food, that is! Pasta, pizza, fresh vegetables, cheese, fruits, grapes and wine, indulging on indulgences without remorse! What to start with and how to stop will be the questions at the forefront of her culinary experience through Rome. The answer to the first, gelato!

“Pray” in India: To stay in an ashram in India and pray is to have a spiritual awakening! “The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, over-simplified, the inability to sustain contentment. To correct imbalance.” Gilbert learns the act of Yoga, but feels compelled to understand it, completely. She decides that to do this she needs a Guru. Guru is made up of two Sanskrit words, darkness and light. Its English translation being “out of the darkness and into the light.” If Yoga is the act of disentanglement, then a Guru is someone who can pass that act onto others. You go to your Guru to be filled with their enlightened state; it passes from them to you. Gilbert vows to become enlightened, centered, and balanced.

“Love” in Indonesia: Bali, a.k.a. “The Island of The Gods” (as of the late 1960’s) is the final stop on her journey of wholeness. But why Indonesia? Years prior, a Balinese medicine man, a healer, painted her a picture of herself: a figure with four legs symbolizing “so grounded to Earth” and a missing head, representing “not looking at the world through intellect” and a face in the heart, that suggests “looking at the world through the heart.” The healer, Ketut Liyer, told her to come and stay with his family; she could teach him English, and he would teach her what he knows. Ketut teaches Gilbert that “to meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away your dirty energy.” She is there to work on her equilibrium, a balance, to figure out “where she belongs” on the grid of life. To know where you belong is to have power, lose that balance and lose your power. On her final mission, with Ketut’s guidance, Gilbert vows to find her power and never lose it; then, she will be ready for love!