Layers

My summer reading list included "Eat, Pray, Love." It was my first e-book experience - I read it on the iPhone - so convenient! I experienced a vast range of emotions as I read and related to Elizabeth Gilbert's deeply personal and heartrendingly honest musings about her broken spirit; the pains of her marriage, divorce and the subsequent failed relationship; her travels to Italy, Indonesia, and India; and ultimately, her healing. I understood that I also was badly broken and desperately needed to heal. Unlike Ms. Gilbert, however, I did not have a publisher willing to finance a year-long three-country writing adventure (yes, I'm jealous!). But I liked the idea of traveling alone with no particular plans other than to just be enveloped in the embrace of the Universe and to peel away the many layers of pain, bitterness, anger, sadness, guilt, and fleeting moments of happiness that I had become over the years. Like Ms. Gilbert, and I suspect so many other people, women in particular, I not only wanted to peel them away, I wanted to examine each one and truly see the contribution each layer had made to my current state of mind. I wanted to examine those layers and them put them away forever. I wanted to - no, I want to, heal my badly broken spirit.