I waited, and waited, in ever such impatient patience, until the duct-taped box from my daughter arrived. It was one box among many, but this particular box, she had promised, would have within it her very best and most loved books, and among those -- Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" that I had been longing to read. All of these boxes were arriving at my door because my daughter was taking wing on a journey like none before, and she is, for her 26 years, well traveled even when measured against adults thrice her age. It was a journey to complete her Master's degree, yes, but more than that. It was a journey to fulfill a young woman's (inherited from her mother) wanderlust, as well as a study abroad, as well as a spiritual journey, as well a journey of healing after a painful breakup of a relationship back home.

Indeed, how like Gilbert's story! Almost as if the two women, never having met, have moved on parallel lines. Perhaps that is why Gilbert's story so appeals. If we haven't traveled it ourselves in our physical bodies, surely we have traveled it in our hearts and minds. Away from pain, towards enlightenment. Away from disappointments and varied betrayals, toward renewed, or even new, wholeness. Away from what was and full flung into what is and what will be.

While our individual journeys in life may vary in detail, and no doubt rather unimportant detail, Gilbert touches so very many of her readers because in her honest, open, sincere, and often deliciously hilarious and hilariously delicious account, she speaks for many, many, many of us. Even if some of us stay in place to find our healing and learn our life lessons, minds and hearts travel freely. We can find our spiritual awakenings in an Indian Ashram, as she does, or we can find it standing in our own shower on a Monday morning, facing another work week in our accustomed routines.

Gilbert's journey takes her first to Italy, where she heals her body, mostly through the pleasures of food; then to India, where for months she meditates and prays; finally to Bali, Indonesia, where she completes her healing and finds new love when she was sure she never again would. She takes us, her readers, along with a story that pulls us along jumping and skipping and running and gasping, not missing a moment, eating and praying and loving right along with her.

I enjoyed the sections my daughter had highlighted; they might have been mine. My girl is heading to Europe, and her journey will not be so different, in pursuit of learning, and understanding, and healing her own broken heart. I have no doubt that she will return changed forever, and in a most wondrous way. Travel does that to us. The meeting with new cultures and peoples, challenging our own comfort zones, testing our own ideas of what life means and how we fit into it.

I eagerly rush to read more of Gilbert's work. She knows how to translate experience into wonderful words, and for one reason above all -- her courage to write honestly about an honest effort to live life well.

Most highly and enthusiastically recommended.