Weekend in Review: Eat

Nashville, TN: The last three days have been filled with back to back with spiritual surprises. Ok, not actual surprises, since I knew each was happening, but more of the unexpected feelings that surfaced during each event.

I was going to try to cram all three into one blog post, but as soon as I started describing the first experience, I knew I had to break them into smaller portions. Easier for me to illustrate and easier for you to digest.

To start (and to appropriately title the next three posts), on Friday night, I went to see the new movie, "Eat Pray Love." It feels like only yesterday when I finished reading the book it was based on and actually met the author, Elizabeth Gilbert. But yet, it has been over three years. Three long years full of growth and change and loneliness and amazingness and heartbreak and love. The night before the premiere, I found my signed copy of EPL, dusted it off, and flipped back through some of the pages I had dog-eared. There were a few bits in "Eat" I had highlighted (pages 84 & 94, if you're following along), almost ALL of "Pray" (including highlights, page foldings, stars and changed names on pages 148-150), but nothing in "Love." I kept my curiosity of what I missed in that chapter in the back of my mind as I watched the movie.


Overall, it was... good. (This is why I'm not a movie reviewer.) To be fair, as a rule, movies from books are never good as the books themselves. And Julia Roberts, as great as an actress as she is, will always be Julia-Roberts-playing-someone-else. The imagery was amazing (though I don't think you could get bad ariel shots of Italy, India & Indonesia if you tried) and some scenes (such as Richard from Texas telling his painful story on the rooftop) were so powerful, I cried, even though I knew the story already. But they spent too much time in Italy and overlooked big chunks of her spiritual awkwardness.

However, I was able to see, maybe for the first time, the power of "Love." (Which is not a huge surprise, considering I've actually found it again.) So, I returned home, took my book out again and skimmed through the last chapter, looking for some new information that I may have missed the last two times I read it.

What I rediscovered, interestingly enough, was not the gushy falling-in-love bits that one might assume I lean toward now, but rather, the one-on-one showdown she had with her mind on a 10 day silent retreat (which the movie left out, so don't be expecting it). She called upon the darkest parts of herself -- sadness, anger, shame -- and "acknowledged their existence, felt their horrible pain, invited them into her heart." After it was all said and done, she realized "her heart was not even nearly full" because "its love was infinite."


However, THAT'S not even what got me. What got me was the what came next.
"I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: 'I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.'"
And that is what I found out I love about "Love." That despite my darkness creeping into my head and taking over from time to time, my heart will always take care of me and love me. And despite everything, my heart -- as an extension of my consciousness, my higher power, my God -- will never leave me.