Eat Pray Love

I told you in the last entry that I’m reading Eat Pray Love  by Elizabeth Gilbert, given to me as a belated birthday gift by my sister. It is fabulous, and I don’t think it is a gross exaggeration to say that I could be happy to do nothing but read it 24-7, 365. Of course, I would soon run out of book, but you know what I mean. If the woman chronicled every minute of her life, I would be tempted to spend mine reading it! Heaven help me if she ever starts a blog.

Eat Pray Love (as you may already know—seems I’m one of the last people on Earth to read it!) is her memoir of a year that she spent divided among Italy, India, and Indonesia, recovering from divorce. Her writing is delicious—funny, self-revelatory, insightful, light and profound at the same time, it is the perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent, like the perfect meal.

And the perfect meal, is, indeed what she seeks in the first third of the book as she searches Rome—indeed, much of Italy over 4 months—for the ideal plate, and describes her findings in mouthwatering detail. I am willing to bet that at this very moment, there are dozens, if not hundreds, on a pilgrimage to eat the same perfect pizza she discovered in Naples.  After developing a new ability to devote every day to pure pleasure sans the guilt in Italy (gelato for breakfast is a favorite decadence), and gaining the weight to go along with it, she heads to India to spend the next 4 months in an ashram, where she shares the spiritual insights she develops in a way that, frankly, makes me deeply envious! Her way of describing her emotional and spiritual process, and, oh, by the way, revealing the secrets of the Universe, is simply masterful, and I admit to wishing desperately to have her writing style. Okay--truthfully? I found myself wishing to BE her, and reminding myself over and over about the time I wanted to be somebody else and God said something to the effect of, “But I already have a perfect (her name)—what I need is for you to be YOU because you’re the only one who can fully be that.” 

Anyway, I’m now in the last part of the book where she spends 4 months in Indonesia, and I’m already both looking forward to finishing, and wishing it would go on forever. But I have my own books to write and so it’s a blessing it doesn’t!

It was a beautiful late afternoon in the garden today, where I spent some time reading. Here is a view of the pansies with the sunlight coming through them from behind in my Happy Place: