Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: Eat, Pray, Love
This is a memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, who weaves a fascinating story of her travels across Italy, India and Indonesia to explore three aspects of her nature. She sets out on her adventure following a bad divorce, a rebound love affair gone sour, a severe depression, and finally, a life-changing late-night conversation with God.
She writes..

I seem to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair,” she writes, “and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I’d read that in a book somewhere.
What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: “Hello, God. How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.”

That’s right — I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, “I’ve always been a big fan of your work…”
“I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,” I continued. “But I’m in serious trouble…Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do…”
And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty–Please tell me what to do.
Then I heard a voice. Please don’t be alarmed–it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
The voice said: Go back to bed, Liz.
I exhaled.
It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have trusted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that is not true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed because I love you. Go back to bed because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes you’ll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon, but not tonight.
Therefore, Go back to bed, Liz.

And so her dark night of the soul, followed by this epiphany of spirit, prompted her to go on a quest to explore those things of life which had been eluding her. Gilbert is such a remarkable writer, full of wit and grace and wisdom, that I want to just hug her and tell her how very beautifully she has woven her tale and how very much it touched me.
I want to tell her how much she made me laugh out loud, and how what she has to say about her search for God and meaning so aligns with the way I, too, have come to know the Divine that I have read those paragraphs over and over, all the while nodding my head in total agreement, and marking that page to come back to again. And again.
In Italy for four months to learn Italian (for no other reason than she had always wanted to speak what she considers to be the most beautiful language of all), she literally eats her way out of her life-threatening depression into the experience of finally understanding the great pleasure there is in being alive. In her next four months in an ashram in India, studying and learning to meditate (where perhaps her greatest teacher is a redneck from Texas), she affirms her devotion to that which sustains her life and finally gives it meaning.
About learning to meditate, Gilbert writes:

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”–the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking.
Happy thoughts make me happy, but — whoop! — how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Traveling finally to Bali, Gilbert learns to open her heart once again, finding friends and a new family and being nurtured by that love in which she is finally allowed to flourish. She finds happiness, and it is about this state of being that she waxes perhaps the most eloquent,

I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment.
It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress, but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Eat, Pray, Love has given me hours of happiness, a lot of inspiration, and a big dose of delight. This book is one of those gifts with such rare insight, beauty and wisdom that I somehow believe the author is my friend — my awesome, funny friend — with whom I have shared an amazing journey.
Eat, Pray, Love
One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert
Penguin Books
New York, NY
Reviewed for The Conversations with God Blog by Rita Curtis