Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

On the way home, Felipe asks whether Wayan bought the house. When Liz says, “not yet,” he urges her to be careful. He has lived in Bali for five years, and “sometimes it’s hard to get to the truth of what’s actually happening” (335). Wayan has the money in her bank account, and Liz should make sure she buys a house with it.

Wayan gives Liz a 35th birthday party and dresses her for it in a traditional Balinese outfit. She asks Liz if she has the prospect of marrying Felipe, and Liz says,” no,” that she doesn’t want any more husbands. Wayan says Felipe is a handsome man inside and outside, something very unusual, and she takes credit for “praying” him to Liz. The party is typical Balinese: the people, dressed in their finest clothes, sit and stare at each other. Liz chose July 18th so she could share the birthday party with Little Ketut who never had a birthday party before. The party includes Wayan’s family and patients, Yudhi, an American filmmaker Liz and Felipe met in a bar, and John, a seven-year-old boy with an American father. It’s an international, intergenerational mix of people, “maybe the happiest” Liz ever “experienced in my whole life” (338).

Liz and Felipe step in to facilitate Wayan’s home-buying. They find a realtor, but Wayan doesn’t like anything they show her. It turns out that buying land in Bali is complicated. It’s hard to find out what’s for sale, whether the owner really owns it, and whether there are geological issues. Wayan, as a healer, also must examine the spirit of the place. Felipe finds a property that should work, but Wayan cannot be hurried. She needs to consult a priest to find an auspicious day to make the purchase and must have an “auspicious dream” to assure she wants to live there. Felipe offers to drive her to a temple to make an offering and pray for the dream. Another excuse: She can’t go to the temple for a week because she is menstruating.

Liz likes the way Felipe goes about Wayan’s house hunting. It brings them together like a “real couple.” He was bored in Bali before her, and now he is absorbed with her. He wants to share his life with her, but he knows there is a limit to the life he can offer in Bali. Liz doesn’t fit in with the ex-pats there. Although talented and clever, they have all surrendered ambition. Felipe acknowledges that she is a career woman. If she wants Felipe, she can have him. He is hers. She struggles with this and then has two significant dreams. In the first, her guru comes to her and announces she is closing her ashram. Her students have enough teaching. In the second dream, she is in a restaurant in New York with Felipe. She looks across the room and sees Swamiji who smiles at her, then raises his wine glass. He mouths the word to her: “Enjoy.”

Liz seldom sees Ketut during her involvement with Felipe and house-hunting for Wayan. She stops by a few times, but just to say hello. She comes one morning, and he asks her if she will leave soon, if she is still meditating, if she still follows the practice of her guru and teachers, whether she still has bad dreams, and whether she is now happy with God and loves her boyfriend. All her answers are affirmative. He tells her to spoil her boyfriend and asks her to come back for his cremation ceremony. Then he invites her to join him for a baby ceremony.

The Balinese do not let a child touch the ground for six months after birth. Children are sent from the gods, so you do not let them crawl around on the ground. Ketut dresses in his finest clothes. It is hot, the ceremony long, and the 40 guests are sweating. The baby does not cry or fuss through four hours of service. Then Ketut draws a magic picture of the universe. The whole family gathers to dip the baby’s feet in holy water. Then they let her feet touch the ground for the first time, leaving a damp footprint.

Liz will leave Bali in two weeks, and Wayan still hasn’t closed on a property. She keeps stalling, finding excuses, and even invents a farmer’s wife who needs to give permission. Women in Bali do not need to give permission. Liz hears Richard from Texas saying to her, “She fucking with you, Groceries” (353). Felipe explains this is the Balinese way. They try to get the most out of Westerners. Wayan can buy part of a property, but she wants the whole property so she can build a hotel.

Felipe urges Liz to take control. Liz doesn’t want to play games, but she must. She tells Wayan her friends are angry she hasn’t found a property, and they want their money back. She tells her they think Wayan is “bullshit,” a word thoroughly incorporated into the Balinese language, the worst thing you can call anyone. Within four hours Wayan calls to say she has purchased the property from the farmer. When Liz gets off the phone, Felipe asks if they can go on vacation.

They will go to Gil Meno, an island east of Bali where Liz did a 10-day retreat silence four years earlier during her “dark night of the soul.” You can walk the circumference of the island, located exactly on the equator, in just one hour. Liz recalls the silent retreat when she mentally and emotionally relived every injustice and loss until nothing was fighting inside her mind anymore. When she broke her silence, she wrote in her notebook, “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you” (362). She returned to the “infinite love” she found there again and again during the next two years, always finding help when she needs it.

Liz and Felipe sail to Gili Meno. She feels “happy and healthy and balanced” (363). She thinks of a Zen Buddhist belief as an analogy to her experience. The oak tree is the creation of two forces: the acorn and the future tree that “pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void” (364). The oak tree creates the acorn that gives it life. Perhaps this fully actualized self, this happy and balanced self, the oak tree, hovered over the acorn sobbing on the bathroom floor, telling her to go back to bed, knowing this future self was waiting for her to arrive.

Felipe suggests a potential life together. He needs to be in Bali, Australia, and Brazil; and she needs to be in the United States. They could build a life together around the four places: “Australia, America, Bali, Brazil = A, A, B, B. Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets” (365). She likes the poetry of the idea. After a year of full concentration on “I’s,” Felipe suggests a whole new “theory” of travel. When they prepare to jump out of the sailboat to wade to shore, Liz says “Attraversiamo” to Felipe, “Let’s cross over.”