eat. pray. love.

I've just finished reading this book. The author takes a year out of life for herself after a bad divorce. The book has been out awhile and probably many of you have read it. I just want to share some beautiful prose about her time spent in Italy, focusing on pleasure. Fairly specifically - the pleasure of eating Italian food and learning to speak the lovely language.

Anyway, check out these descriptions of the food ... as I read, the items just sprang forth in my imagination, vivid and full of life. What's not to love about a woman who speaks so worshipfully about cuisine? Those who know me are aware of what a skeptical cynic I can be; but if I were going to worship anything, it would be the earth's bounty and those who create beauty from it.

Elizabeth Gilbert speaks of her foray into Bologna. She tells us that Bologna has been called "The Red, The Fat and The Beautiful. She loved the food there even better than in Rome. Here's an excerpt of her descriptive abilities:

"The mushrooms here are like big thick sexy tongues, and the prosciutto drapes over pizzas like a fine lace veil draping over a fancy lady's hat". In Lucca, she extols the virtues of "its celebrated butcher shops, where the finest cuts of meat I've seen in all of Italy are displayed with a 'you know you want it' sensuality in shops across town. Sausages of every imaginable size, color and derivation are stuffed like ladies' legs into provocative stockings, swinging from the ceilings of the butcher shops. Lusty buttocks of hams hang in the windows, beckoning like Amsterdam's high-end hookers."

Wow! She lit a fiery desire in me to fly immediately back and visit those shops...if only to flirt with the meat and produce!

So, fortunately, she covered the eat part first in the book because the pray and love part would have stopped me from starting. But her insights gleaned and shared from her 4 months in an Indian ashram were also ... interesting, if nothing else. Can I say I am now converted and off on a yogi-seeking pilgrimage? No. But I felt her passion and raw emotion in sharing her experiences which, in part, could only be described as mind and life altering.

The eat part was still my favorite. Her obvious love of Italy, the food and language, was so brilliantly conveyed as she wrote of her daily life there. I was transported.

If nothing else, she inspires one to take a chance on finding more from life. And of expecting more for and from oneself than the norms require.

If you are even somewhat curious, check out my "I Recommend" box to the right. You can purchase your own copy here! (shameless, aren't I?)