Recently Read: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

This book is a treat! Gilbert is a magnificent writer who writes of her metaphysical journey and her physical journey with humor, wisdom, and a lot of chutzpah. With the breakup of her marriage, and then the breakup of her post-marriage love affair, Gilbert finds herself yet again in despair and quivering on a bathroom floor. Gilbert decides enough is enough. She sets off on her journey (financially assisted by an advance on this book, let me point out with envy). First, to Italy to eat, eat, eat. She is drawn there by her sheer love of the sound of Italian with a mission is to learn the language. Her adventures include making a new dear friend, Guilo, who points out that cities, countries, and even people can be identified through a single word. Gilbert decides her word is SEEK. So seek she does, and is off next to India to pray, pray, pray. Her description of her meditations, her friendships, and her thoughts are insightful, inspiring, and sometimes irreverent. Note: her journey is to countries beginning with “I” so it is appropriate that the book also can be described with “I” words.

From India, she heads to Bali in Indonesia to study wisdom at the feet of her next teacher, an elderly medicine man. Again, she shares generously with the reader her thoughts, fears, embarrassments, and all that she learns is also ours. And it is here in Bali that her path crosses a man from Brazil, and she can now express herself through love. Well worth reading for anyone who has engaged in a bit of self-exploration or traveled, or anyone who has ever WANTED to do a little self-exploration or traveling.