Eat Pray Love

This is first travel writer in a long while whose voice reminds me of my own quest as I travel around the world. I just started reading Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love" tonight on the flight from Vancouver to Grand Cayman. Its now a hot "june-bug" night as I layover at an airport motel in Albuquerque and thought I would share these great reminders that its definitely the journey - not the destination.

On God
"Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed - much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love.

In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them."

On Being in the 'Zone'
"I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” – a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself….then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe. I can’t help but believe it, given my experience."

Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat Pray Love