Jen: Eat, Me: Pray, Debbie: Love.
What an amazing journey Elizabeth Gilbert chronicled in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. I am not really much of a reader, but I did catch this one (well, on CD in the car). It was so beautiful of Liz to "let us in" to her personal journey to peace and self-discovery. Immediately after losing my job, my gut was telling me to take it as an opportunity, and told my self countless times, "Now you can go live in Europe." That could have easily been just a pep-talk, but it is about to become a reality for me. A huge part of my decision to actually make it happen was a direct result of my exposure to this book. The book touched me and reached me on a very real level. I don't have that much in common with Liz Gilbert. Let's put it this way...I am not a Yoga person, I have no desire to meditate, visiting India or an ashram hold no allure for me, and my chakras are definitely not "aligned," okay? And yet, her story--the humanity and spirituality and faith shared in her story--was so easy for me to relate to. The movie made a good effort to be true to the book, but it really can't touch the "magic" that the book exposes the reader to.
I'll end with an excerpt from the book that moves me.
"My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well - the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.
I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me- I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of the small Indonesian fishing boat-who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time-'Yes-grow! Change! Evolve!Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!' And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear, 'Go back to bed, Liz...' Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me."
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