A few months back I finished reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Three very cool friends of mine recommended this book to me in one week. I marched down to the local English bookstore here in Abu Dhabi and as fate would have it, there was a freshly imported copy waiting on the shelf with my name written all over it.
If you haven’t read the book, the story is about a thirty-something woman who decides she doesn’t want kids and she doesn’t want to be married anymore. To gain back the sense of who she is, she decides to take a year off and travel to three very different countries that she has always wanted to visit: Italy, India and Bali, Indonesia. All three countries begin with the letter “I” and she in unapologetic for taking this time to explore what it means to be her a rediscovery of what “I” means to her in this newly created single life.
She goes to Italy to experience total self indulgent pleasures, India for total uninterrupted hardcore spirituality training in an ashram, and to Bali, which is famous for blending the two. I haven’t been to Italy (yet!) but I have been to both India and Bali twice. In some ways, I could have written a book very similar to this one. So here is my opinion of the book, and how I would have written it, had I written it!
I think most women in their thirties and having managed to remain single have a small- I wouldn’t exactly call it a crisis- but a time where they have to sit on a sharp rock and decide if the way they are living their life is going to lead into the life they want to be leading when they are in their fifties or so. In our twenties, we are always told, “C’mon, you are young, you have the whole world ahead of you.” Then one day, people stop saying that. They start to look at you and say, “How old are you now? 30? Well, it’s something you better start thinking about.” And the older you get past thirty, people start to look at you as a lost cause. This has its good and bad points. On one hand, you stop getting so much encouragement and nurturing support from people as you are definitely old enough to make your own decisions, but on the positive hand, the prodding begins to slow down and along with it the unsolicited advice and you are more and more free to live as you see fit.
Recently on a trip back to Canada, I ran into someone I used to know years ago in the Toronto airport. We were both on the same flight back to Victoria. I would have loved to avoid him, a man in his fifties with a reputation for being slightly weird, eccentric and stodgy in a very conservative way, but in that small waiting room, there was no escaping. He sat next to me, and we quickly caught up on what we had been doing in the five years that passed since we had last seen each other. He was doing the same thing. He moved to a new apartment with his wife. His brother got a job at a school but was worried about getting fired. That was all he really said had happened in the past five years.
In the past five years, I had moved to China and worked in an international Kindergarten, worked on my Chinese, climbed a volcano in Bali and Borobudur in Java, fixed my teeth in Thailand and discovered yoga, swam in Red Sea in Egypt, rode scooters in Turkey and moved to the Middle East where I was living the life of a university English instructor living the trials and tribulations of shared-housing.
“Yeah,…. But….” I waited for it. “You’re in your thirties now. When are you going to come back to Canada, settle down and start living your real life?” After two long flights and two long layovers, an uncomfortable catch up on sleep bundled into an rigid plastic chair in the Paris airport, I wanted to rip out the few remaining hairs straggling out of the top of this man’s head. But, I didn’t.
So I can identify with Liz Gilbert. I know I am not alone out there, there are lots of women who have decided to take the same path as me, not making marriage and children a goal, but rather something we’ll think about if or when the opportunity arises. Until then, we find fulfillment in other areas of our lives. And up until my thirties began, I found my fulfillment in traveling and making stuff. And I still love to do that. But that traditionally ideal life of moving home, finding a husband and popping a few bundles of attention-needing, sleep-depriving bundles of joy just hasn’t appealed to me. And believe me I have considered it, as we all do at some stage in our single- living thirties. Because like it or not, that clock is ticking, but at 34, my maternal instincts just haven’t kicked in and I am really happy on the path I have chosen. I’m not saying never, but at 34 I can unapologetically say not likely.
EAT
So Liz decides to reclaim her “I”ness by doing something I do frequently. She shuts down her life in North America and with her life in boxes, she heads overseas. She travels to Italy, studies Italian, eats her heart out, wanders around Rome, meets lots of people, gains a lot of weight which I imagine she loses in India. I have done all those things. I really liked this part of the book, maybe because I have never been to Italy and think it sounds romantic. She’s peaked my interest. I have never really been to Europe other than a one month trip to Germany in 95, (and I went in winter and spent a lot of time trying to warm my toes in Berlin museums), and a quick trip to Greece, which if you actually read my blogs, you know all about that. So thank you Liz, I will try to get to Europe now that I am getting a little older an no longer feel the need to travel all the time like a vagrant hippie. A croissant in a roadside café and a cup of coffee sounds my speed these days.
Two things I would have done differently than her: I would have gotten a scooter. Oh Italy on a Vespa! A dream of mine, zooming down Italian countryside highways, little narrow strips of pavement leading me into freedom like no other, a coast down a wobbly cobblestone street, oh yes, let’s park on the corner next to that stone building and grab a cappuccino- but let me take off my goggles and scarf. Yes, cute Italian boy, you can buy me a cappuccino as long as they have soy milk. I’m lactose intolerant. They do? Oh heaven!!!
And I would have gone into a museum. She didn’t go to one museum!!! But then again, I may have gone into those museums full of all those masters and been inspired to go out and buy some paint and some canvas. Then I may have been inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci and become a famous artist, hanging around Italy in my beautiful little studio, which would become the local hang out for all the cool people of Rome. It would be just like the life of Andy Warhol but Italian style. Then I wouldn’t have time to write this blog. See? Its better I don’t go to the Museums of Rome.
PRAY
Next Liz goes to India and enrolls in an ashram. She does some yoga, but really goes head first into the meditation. She hangs out with a guy named Richard from Texas, who basically keeps her grounded though out the whole enlightening experience. I admit, I love to be friends with older men. I can totally relate. I have a few good friends who are older gentlemen and what I love about them is that they have the ability to keep me a little grounded when I take off with my flighty ideas. They are my Richards from Texas.
I understand that her point of going to India was to explore her spiritual side. And generally I think she does a good job of describing her time, and her emotions, contemplating God as she rose at five am to scrub the temple floor, battling her own thoughts, ideas, and aversions. And in the end, I truly believe she accomplished what she set out to do.
But, I admit, had it been my time in India, I would have gotten out of the ashram to explore India a little more. I have never been to an ashram, but I have heard a little about them, having traveled through India twice, one of those trips through Goa and Kerala which hold a large number of famous ashrams, including that of the hugging lady, Amma, which I am pretty sure is the anonymous ashram which she visited. But they greatest thing about India is the way that spirituality is woven into the very fabric of Indian life, from the young women who go out in from of their doors in the morning and draw beautiful designs in rice flour with the flick of their wrists, to how they adorn their bodies, prepare their food, paint their houses, interact with each other.
India is a country of extremes. You can be looking at the most beautiful temple, the door laden with perfectly formed marigold flower garlands, and be smelling the most horrific smell coming from somewhere on the urine soaked sidewalk a few feet away. And a waft of incense will float by and sanitize your nostrils as a cow bumps you, sending you into the temple where the heat of the street is replaced by the smooth coolness of the marble. And oh the people you meet there. Absolutely amazing and absolutely horrible. And absolutely wonderful.
Rene and I once asked each other the question on a long trip somewhere, if you could only travel one country for the rest of your life, where would it be? We both chose India without hesitation. But admittedly, there were times I hated it. And times I loved it. And once I am outside of India looking back, I absolutely adore it. It’s truly the only place on earth where you can have all of your senses thoroughly assaulted till you can’t take anymore and it’s only noon.
LOVE
The next part of the book, Liz finds herself in Bali, and more specifically, Ubud. In all of my collective five weeks in Bali, I have spent three and a half weeks in Ubud alone, so I have my own words to describe how Ubud looks to me. I annoyed myself, as I read her luscious descriptions of our vibrant and culturally rich town among the rice paddy fields in the lush mountains of highland Bali, interrupting the author’s written word with my own thoughts of, “yeah yeah, I know! I know that place! What did you do there?” and racking my brains to try to pinpoint where she was exactly and why she went there instead of here etc.
Liz spends her time divided between two spiritual healers, meditating, and meeting the various expats who call Bali their home away from home. I spent my time in the local Bali Spirit Kafe, dividing two balls of coconut and lemongrass sherbet with my fork, meditating on what to eat next or what to do with my lazy afternoon- yoga class or a massage, meeting the other travelers perched on the pillow next to me. Similar but different.
One day as I sat perched on a pillow, chatting with a girl I met in Desiree Rumbaugh’s Anusara yoga workshop a few days earlier, she introduced me to a tall thin cool guy named Eyal, who was busy studying Bahasa and learning all he could about the raw food diet. You might remember him from my first blog. When I met Eyal, he was coming off a fast, hence the reason he was parked in the café on the pillow next to me. I confided in Eyal and my yoga acquaintance that I was scared of monkeys and didn’t want to go into the Monkey Forest by myself. Eyal decided to help me conquer my fears after assuring me that the monkeys were lazy in the afternoon, having aggressively fought for food from the tourist buses in the morning. He was right, and we formed a little traveling friendship for the remainder of our time in Bali.
One day I accompanied Eyal to visit a woman named Wayan, Who had been helping Eyal with the raw food diet and even given him a place to stay in her house, on the outskirts of town. He felt bad because he had been staying in her house and recently decided it was a little too much togetherness with the worker boys and moved into a guesthouse up the road from mine. So we went for a visit and a lunch to show that he was still interested in being their friend, if not their roommate.
We ate a holistic lunch of- God I can’t remember. I remember seaweed and red rice and a few other things that have slipped my mind. I remember the boys washing the dishes and peeping through the bric-a-brac separating the dining room from the kitchen. Wayan seemed polite but a little put out that Eyal showed up with a girl. Eyal told me later that the 15 year-old Indonesian wash up boys thought I was hot. All assumed I was Eyal’s new girlfriend, though nothing could be farther from the truth for either of us.
Later, Wayan’s daughter Tutti came home, and we sat around the table covered in a plastic picnic table cover and admired Tutti’s freshest drawings. She was a beautiful bubbly little girl, with a large personality and smile to match. I remember her as being about 12, though I could be wrong. They urged her to tell her the story of how Wayan and her got their house from an american writer, but Tutti was tired of telling the story and dismissed it with a laugh and a calculated switch of topics. Smart girl!
After that, we decided to vary our diet with supplements of the raw food plate in the Bali Buddha restaurant across the street from Wayan’s place, which involved a sting operation of making sure no one was hanging outside Wayan’s and jumping into the back of the second floor balcony where we couldn’t be seen from the street. Sometimes Ray, a yoga instructor at Bali Spirit and fellow table-sharer in the café would join us and we would chat, read the newspaper, and Eyal and Ray would hash out the finer points of the raw food diet, and Ray and I would hash out the finer points of yoga. We made a fine little trio and I spent plenty of time cruising around Ubud on the back of Ray’s motorcycle when Eyal and I weren’t exploring other areas of Ubud on foot.
Liz Gilbert went to Wayan’s place, and Wayan and her daughter Tutti become two of the largest characters in the book. Wayan, a single mother, was struggling financially and Liz Gilbert raised the money from her friends in New York to buy Wayan a house, which she did, which is the house my friend Eyal stayed in with Wayan’s worker boys. Wayan was the chef of the famous red rice I didn’t like. Wayan also gave Ray some wicked massages and treatments which were easily affordable before she became the star of Liz Gilbert’s book. I wonder how Wayan’s life has changed since the release of this book- I’ll check it out next trip to Bali! I’m sure she’s making enough now to buy a ten houses and then some!
Liz Gilbert found love on Bali. I never found love there but I cultivated my love of yoga.- and my love for coconut and lemongrass sherbet. If I had written this book, I’m not so sure I would have gone the same spiritual route as Liz but I suppose I sort of did, riding the coattails of my Uber-raw-foodist friend Eyal. Eyal, if you have actually read this far, checking your email from a roadside internet café in Guatemala, thanks for a memorable trip and introduction to raw food, and how to soak your nuts to get the skin off them. Almond nuts, that is!
Sadly my book would have had a different ending that Liz Gilbert’s book. Her book ended in finding a love, my book would have ended in the death of my new friend Ray two weeks after I left him in front of a night club in Seminyak.
Ray spent two more weeks kicking around Bali on his motorcycle, teaching yoga and carrying on basically the way we did before I returned to Shanghai. He flew to Kuala Lumpur and headed to a wedding being held at an exclusive resort on a small minor Malaysian Island. The wedding was perfect, went off without a hitch. Beautiful pictures were taken of Ray with the wedding party in his last hours. Sometime after two am the wedding party decided to go swimming, and with many people thrashing about in the pool, no one noticed Ray didn’t come back up after jumping in. When they pulled him out of the pool, he wasn’t breathing. They managed to resuscitate him and got him onto a speedboat, heading towards the next island that had a hospital, but Ray’s lungs were too full of fluid and he died in the boat. He was 32 years old. No one quite knows why he didn’t come up.
In Yoga we practice Savasana at the end of our session. We lie still and relaxed in the dark and try to clear our minds. The basic idea behind it is that we are practicing for the big sleep, so when we do slip into death it is somehow more familiar and not so scary. If you are like me, it often becomes the lazy time I almost fall asleep. But after Ray’s death, I often think about him during savasana and wonder if practicing this helped him, as he gasped like a fish for air on the bottom of that boat racing along the night in the South China Sea.
One afternoon when Ray and I were silently parked at our table in the Bali Spirit Café, drinking Aloe Vera Lime spritzers and reading, I finished a book I was reading on Buddhist philosophy by Geshe Michael Roach. In the book, Roach described a higher plane he had reached in meditation and touched on what it feels to be enlightened. In that moment, he saw that he had sixteen more lives to live before he reached enlightenment, and he foresaw the future of all of those lives. I turned to Ray and asked him, “If you had the chance to know something about your future, would you want to know?”
Ray put down his book (Life of Pi) and said, “No. There is nothing pressing about my life that I feel the need to know. I don’t want to know when I am going to go. Maybe tomorrow, maybe I’ll live to be a hundred. I’m in no rush to get to heaven. Look at us. We spend our days cruising around one of the most beautiful islands on this earth, eating and drinking what we want, getting massaged with wonderful oils, meeting fabulous people, practicing yoga for hours if we want it. We are so self-indulgent it’s sickening. This is heaven on earth. Who would want more? We just need to appreciate life for the here and now.”
We spent our last day on a sunny beach in Seminyak, watching boys play soccer in the sand. I snapped a picture of him reclining with his hands clasped behind his neck with my cellphone. This was the life. We took turns diving into the warm waters and tasting the salt water, trying to tan our white bodies and chatting when we weren’t drifting in and out of blissful Bali beach heaven. I watched Ray’s thin frame wade into the water and disappear time and time again under the waves. It would have been hard to imagine at the time that two weeks to the day later Ray would die by drowning. I admit I didn’t know Ray well, but I do regret the fact I will never get the chance to know him better.
Ray and Eyal in The Bali Spirit Cafe. I think the only time I saw Ray without that scarf around his neck was when he was doing yoga or on the beach. Thanks Ray, for an important life lesson.
But I will say that Ray’s death has affected me in the sense that anytime I begin to get lost in my own little world, I think about how fragile life is, and Ray has shown that to me. We could be gone ten minutes from now. We need to get our heads out of the sand once in a while and take stock of the big picture. If you died tomorrow, could you sit back on your cloud in heaven and know in your heart you did it right and that you wouldn’t change a thing? Are you living that sort of life? Am I living that sort of life?
Liz Gilbert was on the path of knowing she was living a life that she wouldn’t be happy with, so she took steps to change it. I’m still exploring what it means to be me and how I want to shape my future. I once read a quote somewhere that said, “What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.” My big question is, I am generally happy with what I have. What do I want out of life now?
And that is one of the questions I will be thinking about beginning January 18th, When I take off for a Yoga teacher Training in Goa, India with Rachel Hull (www.shaktispirit.com ), a past instructor from Y-plus in Shanghai, who incidentally was a friend of Ray’s and lead the yoga practice at Ray’s memorial at Bali Spirit, where they planted a tree in his honour.
Yes, Liz Gilbert, I'm off to India. For the third time.
I will be one participant among a group of eight women, at various stages and ages in our lives. I imagine I won’t be the oldest but I won’t be the youngest either. We are going to spend our days filling our brains with the study of anatomy, Indian Philosophy, yoga alignment, Ayurveda, and new experiences. Our mouths will be filled with delicious vegetarian Indian food while we learn the intricacies of ayurvedic cooking. Our bodies will be strengthened and flexed and most importantly largely understood or in my case somehow discovered!
I admit my knowledge of anatomy sucks so I have been busy drawing diagrams of spines and pelvises in my quest to understand the physical side of me before I delve in deeper to the other sides of me as well. I just relearned we have twelve sets of ribs and the heart isn’t actually in the middle of your chest, just to give you an idea. If I can’t see it, I don’t know where it is!
I’ll be back in Abu Dhabi at the end of March to begin life with a new perspective much like Liz Gilbert is doing now. I’m not sure how much time I will have for keeping up with the blogs, but I will do my best to get the word out about how it’s all going. Till then, Happy New Year and Have a wonderful spring!
Namaste!
Melanie