Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love is a beautifully written book by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I've spent the last month listening to her melodic voice reading it. I first read the book a year ago last October while house sitting for my sister in Ventura, the nurturing vistas from her deck on the hill overlooking the bay there a perfect counterpoint to the lessons I was finding in the book. I always meant to pick up my own copy, and I will eventually, but for now I have the audio book read by the author loaded on my ipod and I am on my third time through listening to every word with wonder and hope and love. I am so in love with the words, with the way she reads them, with the wonderful things she has to share that you would think they were fresh donuts warm from the fryer and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Now to digress a bit.

It's been a crazy few weeks, first driving with my daughter and granddaughter (5 months old) on a grand tour of visits to Southern California for five days of showing off the baby to family and squeezing in a quick visit with a friend I miss terribly. Then home again and a long weekend traveling down to Fresno for the annual Safari Archery novelty shoot and hiking over boulders where native Americans use to sit and grind acorns, the holes of their work living on to tell their story. Two days home for laundry and repacking and a couple days of 'real' work and then off north to Redding and their annual Trail Shoot. Hiking and shooting and getting drenched and not giving up despite being a drowned rat with numbing fingers and barking dogs (read that as tired, sore feet.) Anyway, I am home again and just back from walking Kaylee (the wee dachshund I missed so much on all those trips) and listening to E. Gilbert's words and wanted to share the feelings of my walk.

We go several blocks north bordering the nearby golf course until we come to a pond, then we wind our way around the water until we turn East to cross over to a strip of protected land that runs along a creek that is fed from the snows in the Sierras. While somewhere I know in the back of my mind that we are on the edge of suburbia, once there I can let the wind blow around and through me, head back (lifting my heart to the world) and fingers spread wide to feel the coolness blowing by and all of a sudden it's just me on this planet as it spins through the universe. Kaylee sits close by my feet, her nose in the air too, and I wonder if she feels the same connection I do to the world at that moment. And I am so grateful for this beautiful earth we live on and the quiet I find at the end of this trail. I am surrounded by the beautiful foot hills covered in spring grasses, the taller mountains to the north dark with scrub pines, and the huge clouds plowing through the blue sky like tug boats on their way to Kansas; their bottoms dark with rain yet to fall and their tops stacked tall and thick and gleaming white in the afternoon sun. At that moment I feel so blessed, so much a part of it all, that I can even think of Joey and stay glad. At that moment I am not just there enjoying the weather, but I am also the observer watching this woman and her little dog and loving them because they are a part of me, and I am a part of them .... lol, 'and we are all together.' (Think Bono singing in Across The Universe.) When I left the house for this walk I really had to talk myself into going, telling myself that Kaylee needed the time & attention, that the exhaustion I was feeling could be ignored for her. Arriving home I am refreshed, and feel like writing for the first time in quite a while.

There is a small, very small, dark corner inside me trying to make a stand now that I am back home and the wind is no longer holding my spirits aloft. But I have a feeling I will never let it grow big again. These words I have been listening to over and over are a blessing, a benediction, a cleansing of spirit like I have never known before, and I send light to this woman for sharing a part of her life and giving me a better way to think about some important things. I am so open now to whatever is going to happen next in my life, and I think somewhere out there walking today I made a decision that it's time to be happy again. Maybe it's just another nudge in the right direction, but it feels more like turning a corner - or to be more exact, it feels like I've opened up a little inside, that I'm no longer clenched tight by grief. This is a good thing, and the freedom is lovely, and I know Joey would approve.

ps Did you figure out I am recommending her book to read?
pps Happy Cinco de Mayo