Being that I just spent about ten minutes rummaging through all of Elizabeth Gilbert’s quotes on Goodreads and marking oh about a dozen into my list of favorite quotes, I think that I can say with ease that I adored Eat Pray Love.

while i can see the temptation to make it a bible for women’s liberation, i think it is so much more than that. it is a story of personal liberation. that she was a woman is just an extra scoop of ice cream on an already delicious piece of cake.

i enjoyed reading this book because it became a source of genuine deep difficult introspection. i think liz would approve.

last week i was passed over for a job promotion. my manager coming afterward to say that she was impressed with me was less balm and simply more sting.

rejection created a palpable desire to go back to school stat
ignoring the timing that makes sense
so what is missing that leaves me unfilled
and condemns me to busybodying myself
rather than see the truth for what it is

Guilt from losing my religion is so heavy
my prayer is to find god outside of religion
fill the hole meet him
catholics seem too caught up on ritual
as if it in and of itself will bring them to god
but when you come to god it’s on your knees

still on the journey
bear with me
i want ritual because i want god

he is the hole that i sense missing
but wait, no. i DONT want ritual.
i am a lover of symbolism, hater of routine and boredom.
including devotion, daily, of any kind or creed

i swear sometimes i create catastrophes in my life
because i am infinitely better at fixing them
than living day to day
maybe that’s a hint of what field of nursing i’d be good at
am i bound for ER or ICU?

please god teach me to live in the mundane
and not chase shiny things

for i know you are there
but i can’t slow myself down long enough
to see you
please god lead me to the rituals that will bring me to you

some days i feel young, some days i feel so old. my second greatest fear after not being loved would be standing still in one place. at the end of this journey, i acknowledge that my longing is a connection with my God, that my happiness is of my own making, that ritual is something that is both good for me and good for my happiness, that i need to find the devotion that fits my heart and that i am not the only idealist still alive on the planet. i leave with the most hopeful words i found in the book – all about the Augusteum in Rome.

“On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting–the Augusteum.  This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his family for all eternity.  It must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus-worshiping empire.  How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm?  Or, known that, with all the aqueducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of glory?

Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages.  Somebody stole the emperor’s ashes–no telling who.  By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been relocated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from Assaults by various warring princes.  Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we’re in the eighteenth century now), then a fireworks depository, then a concert hall.  In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the property and restored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place for his remains.  (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshiping empire.)  Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he’d anticipated.

Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in the ground.  The city has grown up around it over the centuries (one inch a year is the general rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris).  Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there–from what I can tell–except to use the place as a public bathroom.  But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.

I find the endurance of Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times.  To me, the Augusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life–who maybe started out as a housewife, the unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national politics–yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout every upheaval.

I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all.  It is merely this world that is chaotic, bring changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.  The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.  Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough–but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository.  Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

{bold text my own addition}

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