Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (5 page)

—

Jan Haag

“Remember what our Guru says—be a scientist of your own spiritual experience. You're not here as a tourist or a journalist; you're here as a seeker. So explore it.”

—
RICHARD FROM TEXAS
, Eat Pray Love

M
y husband, a newspaper photographer, died sitting in a massive Arts and Crafts–style oak chair he'd made in our garage. His sister, a costumer for a major filmmaker, helped him sew the leather cushions on her industrial machine. A community college journalism instructor and newspaper adviser, I was in my office at school when I got the call from the coroner's office. That day I learned that coroners don't call you to wish you a good day and, long before the tears came, that my universe had toppled in on itself.

It was a complicated marriage; aren't they all? By the time he died, seventeen years into it, we were living in different towns, though we saw each other on weekends. Most of his coworkers thought he was divorced. We weren't. We still owned a house together, shared a dog. We loved each other; we were family and stayed that way. He was forty-eight years old; I was forty-two.

I spent the next few years taking bits of his ashes in plastic film containers to places he'd loved, to places he'd wanted to go, to places I wanted to go. I deposited them quietly, illegally, in water, in earth, in the mulchy detritus of fall leaves, in snow and once, as close as I could get to slowly creeping lava on a big island in the middle of the sea. I stood and watched as Madame Pele gently surrounded him with thick, steaming fingers, then oozed over him, making him part of her.

I came to think of him as my companion spirit, always with me. Sometimes I'd walk in the house and smell him, and I'd say what he used to say when he heard my voice on the phone:
There you are
.

I took a trip with some of his ashes up the coast of British Columbia, on a small paddle wheeler that looked as if it had just starred in a production of
Showboat
; the captain announced that we were going to see a ghost town. I'm a Californian; I immediately thought of crumbling cabins tilting into deserts, the lone tumbleweed bouncing through the parched scene. But this was land black with old trees, flowing ribbons of dark sea and, over it all, sky so blue it looked like crayons right out of a fresh box. And even from the water, I could see that the tiny town of Ocean Falls was no ghost town. There were people on land, and cars, and on a hill a rose-colored house beaconed its way into my
brain. Out of nowhere, a voice in my head began to relay a story:
My mother painted our house bright pink the summer I turned ten, in a fit of creativity.

I've been writing since I could hold a pencil; I know a fictional character when I hear one. I went to my cabin on the boat and got pen and paper, began scribbling what I heard and saw. In that moment a novel was born.

The next summer I went back with my new partner and his camera. We flew in on a float plane, landed on the saltchuck (a mixture of fresh and salt water) and explored the town, which smelled like pines and the sea. We learned about its history as a once-thriving mill town that housed five thousand people at its peak, now mostly empty, the old paper and pulp mill a hull of its former self. It rained for all five days we were there; Ocean Falls turned out to be the wettest spot in western Canada.

I came home with lots of notes and interviews, with characters and the story of a town the government attempted to bulldoze and burn down before its remaining residents got the destruction stopped. Then I stopped, too. Intimidated, terrified of what lay before me. The responsibility I had taken on to tell this story—which no one had asked me to tell, no one had offered to publish—overwhelmed me.

I put all my Ocean Falls material away and went back to my job, resigned to being “just a teacher.”

Until
Eat Pray Love
showed up. I, like millions of others, fell in love from the first pages, with Liz Gilbert's voice and her story. It wasn't my story exactly, but it was a good one, the very best kind. Immediately I grabbed a pencil and started underlining, because she was talking to me. Richard from Texas was talking to me, too, when he said: “Someday you're gonna look
back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”

I realized then that my heart was still broken from the loss of my husband; that all our hearts get broken in the process of these messy, imperfectly perfect lives. But I also knew how grateful I was for the circumstances that led to that heartbreak—for the huge, love-filled, life-changing events that made me, well, me. As Felipe tells Liz in the book: “This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”

And I knew that was true, too. That I had walked imperfectly through a marriage, that I was, as Liz learned from the Bhagavad Gita, living this life in my own awkward, stumbling way. I had tried. I was still trying.

So I opened my heart to the voices inside, went back to Ocean Falls two more times, did more research, more interviews. I found myself ready to put on the page stories of trees and a town surrounded by mountains and water, inaccessible by road, a small place with people who lived and loved and died. I was helped in this by a writer who didn't know me, but whom I felt somehow I knew, who chronicled her journey to reclaim her heart by traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia. Her book had helped me to reclaim my heart, too. She'd helped me to find the confidence to write three drafts of a historical novel, though I didn't have a publisher waiting for it. Because it was a story I wanted to tell. It showed up on the page, under my typing fingers:
There you are
.

It took me years to write. It found an agent who loved it. It's had more than two dozen rejections, but we keep trying. I've revised it more than once, each time grateful for the chance to
create another version of it. Which, as
Eat Pray Love
reminded me, we do every day, creating anew with, if we are lucky, big love and thankfulness and surprises—lots and lots of surprises.

I look upon this process as a great adventure. I have tried for something. The writing, the research, the travel to this out-of-the-way place has changed me. My broken heart has healed, even though you can still see the cracks if you look closely. My companion spirit has been joined by others, some of them fictional, all of them alive within me. I am ready to be delighted by what comes next.

—

Laurna Strikwerda

W
hen I first read
Eat Pray Love
, it completely freaked me out. As a twenty-seven-year-old woman, I didn't just read it as Liz's story—I read it as a story about what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want to be adventurous.

I'm sure that scaring impressionable twenty-seven-year-olds was the last thing that Elizabeth Gilbert ever wanted to do when she set out to write a memoir about finding her own fine self. I imagine she wanted to tell her story, and if it resonated, great. But her story became bigger than her—it became a story about what it means to be a young woman with infinite choices and possibilities. Why would you keep doing what women have done for centuries if you could chart your own course? Why would you do what your mother or your grandmother had done, and be tied down to one place, if you could be on a plane to the next bit of unknown territory?

I remember my mother talking about being one of the first women in her small Christian college to go on to graduate school, let alone travel to France to do her research. At the time, such a decision was considered a huge step into the unknown. But I'm a member of the
Eat Pray Love
generation of women, and I felt I was expected to do more than that.

I did travel. I visited several countries in college, making my way slowly around the globe with twenty-five other classmates and a professor. I spent a summer in Yemen learning the back alleys of old Sanaa and later made a handful of work trips overseas.

But no matter how many places I went, it never felt like I was being truly adventurous—not
Eat Pray Love
adventurous, at least. Granted, I lived in Washington, DC, which is the one-upping, adventuring capital of the young and professional world. I knew that in reality, only a tiny percentage of America's population and an even tinier percentage of the world's population—especially its women—have the opportunity to get on a plane and travel for work or leisure; that the vast majority of the other humans on this planet are more focused on getting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads than acquiring air miles. But I often forgot this reality when I was surrounded by my own little sliver of the universe, filled with other women-who-were-more-adventurous-than-me. Other women who knew where to get manicures in Benghazi and what to do when your satellite phone stopped working in the Sahara and how to find an authentic Mexican restaurant in Hong Kong. Women who weren't tied down; who had more than one passport, spoke more than one language, had more than one home.

They were the exciting ones, I thought.

Maybe if I traveled once a year. Maybe if I lived abroad for a whole year. Maybe if I lived abroad for two years. Maybe if I traveled and then wrote a book. Maybe then I would be exciting enough to merit the title “adventurous woman.” But until that point, I knew it—I was boring.

And for five long years, I beat myself up for this.

Until one day, when I made my peace with adventure. It happened accidentally, when I was traveling—yet of course still feeling unadventurous.

In the spring of 2015, I went to Spain to walk for a week on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval route that has been used for centuries by pilgrims demonstrating their devotion, and now by spiritual seekers looking for renewal.

Ever since I studied medieval art in college, walking the Camino had been a dream of mine. I loved the idea of a moderately sized adventure, one that was about walking, not running, and still had the safety of towns and sleeping on mats on the floor instead of inside tents. I set off with underprepared feet, too much in my backpack, thirteen words of Spanish and my copy of
Eat Pray Love
. I hadn't picked the book up in years and wanted to come back to it and see if it was still the same story I remembered.

I was going to be walking the Camino with a friend. Not just any old friend, but a Washington, DC, friend who had moved to Europe to become an entrepreneur and then proceeded to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, sail the Mediterranean and take up rock climbing. In short, an adventurous person.

After the first day, my friend and I decided to walk separately
at our different paces. She would bound off each day, blister free, minimalist backpack bouncing, and meet a stranger, who would become an instant best friend.

I, meanwhile, was forcing my swelling feet to take just one more step while walking alone, usually too nervous to strike up a conversation with a stranger.

At the end of the third day of this, after trying to bandage blisters in a field, getting lost (despite the enormous yellow arrows that populate the entire Camino) and then succumbing to a taxi instead of staying on my feet, I crumbled.

“I feel so small,” I said that evening at our hostel, curled up on a mat. “I'm a slow walker, I overpacked, I can't connect with anyone. I have to face it . . . I'm just not adventurous.”

My friend sat down next to me. “Hey,” she said. “I'm just walking—I'm not having an adventure. You're hauling your ass all over this Camino. You're not giving up.
You're
having a freaking adventure.”

I didn't fully process this concept until I was on my way back to the States. A few thousand feet over the Atlantic, I began to unpack this idea I had held, unquestioned, for so long. Was having an adventure really about doing the most daring, bold, energetic thing? Was it about having stories to tell at cocktail parties? Was it about freedom and travel and not being tied down? Or did it have something to do with your own heart and your own courage, in whatever form that came?

On that plane ride home, I read
Eat Pray Love
through a different lens. I read it as one woman's story about listening to her own voice, and where that decision led her.

This time, the passage that most spoke to me was the one about Liz's stay in Italy. “
I have put on weight
,” she wrote. “I exist
more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.”

I realized there was one adventure I had never tried: self-acceptance. I had spent so much time thinking about what I was supposed to be doing, going to, or experiencing, that I had hardly ever managed to hear my own voice. I had hardly managed to see that even if I was walking more slowly, I was still covering ground.

When I returned from the Camino, I joined a neighborhood association and my church council. I knew that I wanted to travel again, but I also wanted to feel rooted in the place that I live; I wanted to hear the voices and stories of my neighbors. I craved what many other women before me had resisted—a sense of being connected to a particular place, to family and community. That was where the weight of my life was pulling me.

Thinking of
Eat Pray Love
now, perhaps Liz didn't necessarily set out to be adventurous or to be free. I wonder if she simply tried to find her own voice, and that search happened to take her around the world. Listening to my own voice led me deeper into my own neighborhood instead. And that's fine. What matters most is paying attention to that inner voice and trusting that it has something to say. That's what
Eat Pray Love
made me do—it made me trust mine.