Eat Pray Love

Tonight I finished my first book of the summer, "Eat Pray Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert! And I am kind of sad about it because it's the best book I've ever read!!

It's the true story of "one woman's search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia", and I have gotten more out of it than any book I've ever read; I went through the book "dog ear-ing" pages with good thoughts and insights that I wanted to read again once I had finished the book... turns out I need to read the entire book again :)

I don't want to give away too much about the book because I genuinely hope that anyone who happens to come across this post will consider picking up a copy, but there are two main parts I want to share briefly.

A major part of the Gilbert's novel is her search to strengthen her spirituality through meditation, and near the beginning of the book she talks about God, and her religious background and where she is now; I admire her greatly for her ability to take into consideration all faiths and their ways of connecting with their respective God's (who is really just One) and this is what she says:

"In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It's like this - I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pounds. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, 'What kind of dog is that?' I would always give the same answer: 'She's a brown dog.' Similarly, when the question is raised, 'what kind of God do you believe in?' my answer is easy: 'I believe in a magnificent God.'"

But perhaps the greatest thing Gilbert says in this novel, and the statement that I connect with the most, she makes at the end when it seems as though she has succeeded in finding "everything":

"What keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years - I was not rescued...; I was the administrator of my own Rescue.

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 getting here and wonder if it was me...who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years... and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear... knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us here. "

That statement is exactly what my hopes are for this summer. I know that it's going to take longer than the 133 days my summer has, but these 133 days are a start to finding the self that I seem to have lost after falling over and over again. I know that I'm here somewhere, and already, every day that I have spent reading, hiking, running, CrossFit-ing, and being with my horse, has begun the process of becoming the person I want to be, and who I know is inside of me somewhere, waiting to be set free.

Day 20 of 133 Days of Summer