I am reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert right now, a very popular book of the moment. I’m really enjoying it. I can’t help avoiding a sense of melancholy longing as I have traveled to all of the places the book takes place in, though I spent little time in Italy. I also did not visit an Ashram in India. When she mentions at one point all the things she thought she might like to see in India, those were among the places I visited instead. However, I spent quite a bit of time in Indonesia, and remember staying a while in Ubud, the village where the author stays. The memories have come flooding back, all the rice paddies and art and flowers and friendly people and beauty. I remember the compounds and rituals and beautiful people and the food. I remember answering “belum” (not yet) to the question, “are you married?” And I remember telling people “jalam jalam” (just walking) when asked where I was going. I remember visiting the Monkey Forest, where a monkey climbed on my shoulder and stole my earring. He pulled it right out of my ear without me feeling a thing, and ran off with it, stopping now and then, taunting me. It’s extraordinary for me to think that many of the people she meets there must have lived there when I was visiting, though my trip in no way resembled hers. I was younger, more naive, had much less money, and my only quest was to have experiences and see new things. It’s fun to revisit these places vicariously through the author, as the trip I took seems so very long ago.
The experience the author had is making me a bit envious, really. I am blown away by the people she has come into contact with throughout her journey, and the incredible experiences she had. Of course, she set out on her quest with very specific goals for each country she visits; she had just gone through a traumatic divorce and was on an intense spiritual quest. But every now and then I think about the fact that different people, and I mean different people as in all people, each and every person, experience the world differently. The author draws people to her, even when her state of mind might suggest that she would push people away. People seem to WANT to help her, yet she never seems truly vulnerable. She can be miserable and lost yet retain her strength and sense of humor. In any case, I think about how radically different the experiences of different people are. I had an incredible life-changing trip, but I didn’t meet God or buy a house for a needing Balinese woman when I went on walkabout, and I’ll bet that most other travelers on the world-wide backpacking highway didn’t either. So what’s different? Was is it well-formed quest and openness to answers from the Universe?
For instance, so much of her journey is improbable. She is a high-acheiving and well-educated divorced woman in her thirties from New York. She is hugely ambitious, and already a successful author. She is obviously very bright and extremely talented and must be very shrewd too, to accomplish so much at a young age in such a competitive environment. So it’s amazing that she can let her defenses down enough to truly trust a Guru and other people that she meets on her spiritual journey. It’s also incredible that she would let the Balinese woman into her life, and completely believe her story. I don’t want to sound cruel and heartless, but when you travel in less-developed countries in the world, many, many people will come at you with one goal–to get your money. This happened to me all the time, and I didn’t have nice things or stay in nice places. I can’t imagine what it’s like for a tourist that clearly has some money. I had an Indian girl almost literally drag me to her home under the auspices of cutting my hair, and then proceeded to try to wrangle as much money from me as possible to doing different treatments I didn’t ask for: putting henna on my hands; special cream on my face, etc. I don’t doubt her true and great need, but she frightened me by how she was trying to manipulate (almost suck) it out of me. After that afternoon she had a nice lump of my money and it was all I could do to get away, I felt so violated. After living in Oakland, CA for several years, my husband and I met several times with true con artists. These were people that would come at you sweating and panting, with an incredible (and very well-rehearsed) tale of woe, and leave with the $20 or so that you gave them (with the promise to return it tomorrow)! Of course, we never saw them again and once or twice learned through the grapevine that this was so-and-so’s usual schtick, that he/she came around all the time with the same story. I was born with a heart that truly wants to believe people, so it’s hard not to get jaded when it’s been taken advantage of a few times.
I don’t doubt at all the need of the Balinese woman or the truth of her meeting God at the Ashram. I believe her stories completely. But, I am both thrilled for her and amazed at how fortunate she was to have come in contact with the people she did. She could easily have ended up at a less holy Ashram (I know a couple people who have had some strange and unsavory experiences) and she could easily have been taken in by some talented con artists (figuring out the ones from our own culture is hard enough, try to recognize those from another culture). It really does seem like she had a special guiding hand from someone or something. So maybe my envy is emanating from this point–I know she had to open herself up wide to have the experiences she did and take some huge risks, but she was extremely fortunate to have such positive experiences. Having traveled in some of the same places, I have been groped on the street by Indian men (who sometimes think Western women are easy from Hollywood films; in Bollywood films you don’t ever see more than a kiss, if that). I was groped in Bali, too, by a taxi driver. Right in front of my boyfriend, I was grabbed between the legs. For the record I am small, I have dark hair, and when I traveled I wore glasses, no make-up, and dressed like I had just robbed a thrift store. I wasn’t exactly dressed to kill, or even to attract any attention at all. Yet the author, despite being fair, blonde, and obviously wealthy, seems to have not attracted any negative attention whatsoever and only drew the most extraordinarily charismatic, kind, good, wise and loving people toward her.
I must admit, I have not finished the book, though I am excited to. She has just commenced her affair with Felipe, the Brazilian, and I am truly hoping that it goes really, really well. I want to believe that she can come out of this year completely transformed, and I expect she will. I think she deserves to, as she has certainly logged enough grief and has made a tremendous effort to get to a better place in her life. If that is truly how the book turns out though, I will expect her to open her own Ashram in a few years as she seems to have a direct pipeline to getting what you need from the Universe, which is something, to quote the Lorax, “that everyone needs.” This, I hope, takes me back to an earlier point. Different people have very different experiences, even under the same circumstances. Perhaps the author is truly interacting with her environment in a very special way, drawing very particular experiences to her. Or perhaps she was very open and very much searching, and at that moment in time, everything fell in to line to provide her with what she needed. We all experience this on some level, at different times. And I do think that when you are really looking, and when your eyes are really open, you do get what you are looking for. I wish her luck–in the rest of the book and on the rest of her journey. She’s restoring a bit of my faith in the magical, and maybe with more faith, some day, I will make bolder moves than I have so far, though hopefully not driven by such negative circumstances. In the meantime I will eat, I might try praying a bit, and I sure do like a lot of things.
