Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I recently lost my job. I say lost even though I resigned because it seems to have disappeared from my life with such light speed. I literally feel like I put it down somewhere and just can’t find the damn thing. But having just lost my job I am trying to settle into what Elizabeth Gilbert describes as bel far niente “the beauty of doing nothing”, rather than the supreme ease and bliss that those words resonate, I find myself trying rather than succeeding. I am rather uncomfortable in my unemployed state, and am discovering that doing nothing in our frantic age, in on par with being nothing.

I am a firm believer that books have a way of just coming into your life when you need them or in my case stalk you until you read them. Gilbert’s book has been nudging me steadily since I traveled to India last year, I read it once with the certainty that everything she was saying had some deep meaning and promptly did nothing about it. Then I lost my job, life generally fell apart around me and there like a signpost from the Universe was Eat, Pray, Love. This book opened up for me a long needed spiritual conversation that had me deeply questioning; whether there might really be something more.

Eat, Pray Love is a story of spiritual exploration set against the backdrop of a travelogue through Italy, India and Indonesia. A journey not so much across the globe but rather as Gilbert calls it a traverse from the “worldly to the eternal”, in search of pleasure, devotion and balance. Gilbert’s story begins with a desperate, late night prayer to God. When an unexpected calm voice answers her prayers, it sets her on a quest of spiritual transformation. Living in a world that has been divided by a war where Islam and Christianity have taken sides, her book presents us with an inspiring alternative. A means by which we can open up our own conversation with God and seek out the golden nugget of divine within.

What Gilbert offers is a yogic journey for our modern times, she calls herself an ‘antevasin’ a Sanskrit word meaning a border dweller between the village and the deep, dark forest of faith. Like her, many of us cannot take up the traditions of monks or Sadhu’s people who turn away from material life to embrace the spirit and seek god. However, like many of us she lives a chaotic and exhausting life, sorely in need of meaning. What she brings to this tradition of spiritual journeying is a rich self depreciating, laugh out loud humour coupled with stunning and candid honestly. Far from heavy spiritual reading, the book is instead filled with mouth watering Italian food, spunky Italian twins, wise-arse joke cracking characters, and a love story ending. She draws the reader in by being both achingly human and a gentle ambassador to the heavens.

I must admit that I read Eat, Pray, Love like something of a guide book, it seemed like Gilbert had crossed the great divide and not only discovered God but herself. Her book although a personal memoir offers many gateways for the reader to enter and live the story. For example in the early chapters, Gilbert writes a heartfelt petition to God to help end her seared and broken marriage. Moved to action I wrote my own petition, a humble dialogue with the universe. I wrote that I was depressed, that I had quit my job, suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage and that life was not really making any sense nor had it been for some time. I asked for help and comfort. That night as I went to bed I saw a single bright star from my window. Offering me a jeweled hope that there was in fact a beautiful order to the world. Even if I didn’t know it. It doesn’t seem like much but I have lived in the inner city, in the same house for last 6 years, and this was the first time I had ever noticed that star.

Gilbert exclaims that of the whole beautiful and poetic Italian language her favourite word is ‘attraversiamo’ meaning crossing over. Her story is an expressive tale of crossing over, in her self-made vessel of faith. Over the divide of the unknown and directly to the divine. What makes her unique is as she calls it, her “cherry picking” of various faiths and practices mixed and matched to find her personal portal to God, which as it were is also a portal within. Great books allow us to imagine different possibilities. With hilarity, mishaps and misadventures Gilbert calls us to pen our own rituals, construct our own vessels, and reengage with a spiritual conversation.