Eat, Pray, Love - and Leave

What does leaving home to 'find oneself' mean if you don't go back home? 


I was captivated reading Eat, Pray, Love. I'm eager to see the movie starring Julia Roberts if and when it comes to Turkey because I love a good story of transformation. It's akin to the feeling I get when reading coming of age novels - a sense of cheering for the neophyte when life lessons are learned and the world feels a little bit bigger and better. 


The book Everything is Going to Be Great by Rachel Shukert came to my attention after reading her essay in the Wall Street Journal on her memoir of her time in Europe. The fact she references and criticizes Eat, Pray, Love makes me think it'll be the not-so-feel-good version of EPL. There is another similarity between the books, though, beyond two women setting off on an adventure of self-discovery abroad.  


Both writers eventually go back home.  


Rachel Shukert's website describes the book as being about "reality-adjusting culture shock that every twentysomething faces when sent off to negotiate "the real world"—whatever that may be." Culture shock. Sending off to negotiate the real world. Those are familiar concepts to me. But rather than "whatever that may be" what about "wherever" that may be? It could be an internal shift, a change in how one looks at the world that is untethered to location.  


Do stories of self-finding and transformation only resonate with us if the protagonist goes back home?  


What if Elizabeth Gilbert had decided to stay in Bali indefinitely, no traipsing back and forth to the US except for holidays? Would we have loved her story as much? Would the transformation ring as true? Why can't I shake the notion that leaving the places you "discovered" yourself in is akin to shaking off a too-needy lover? Get what you want and then leave? The flip side of that question would be why would you stay if the feeling is gone? I admit it leaves me wondering.  


I explore transformation in my post 5 Years in Turkey and 5 Insights. Anastasia Ashman talks about creatives surviving and thriving abroad. Catherine Yigit in Mercury Brief explores being an expat mother in a legendary historical town without an expat community. Tara Lutman Agacayak lists the ten (more) things she learned living in Turkey. There are turning points and transformation stories that have nothing to do with crossing the finish line of returning home.  


What's yours?


Thanks to My Dog Ate My Blog, this post at Love, Rose was mentioned in a discussion on the perpetual pursuit of happiness. 

Verbal footprints

Home prints / photo by Rose Deniz

Sezin described us as 'intimate strangers,' Anastasia a 'carillon,' each person's comments creating a verbal percussion. The nine women who gathered on Sunday to participate in Dialogue2010 astounded me with their clarity of vision, their engagement with creativity, their willingness to bend and flex through identity and language challenges, and their alignment with their core. A year or two ago, I created my vision statement, or what Gwen Bell would describe as a 'personal manifesto,' and these three words have shaped the work I've done since: manifest creative potential. In starting Art is Dialogue and moderating this discussion, I felt that come to life. I felt synchronicty with people I've yet to meet in real life, bonded through a willingness to live a meaningful life at the crossroads. 

How do you manifest your creative potential?

The blog responses to the dialogue have left me speechless. I invite you to dip into the syncopated words of the women who made it happen. As more posts and feedback become available, I'll post updates.

Being grounded is overrated -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation

What determines your present orbit, and how does it change your self-view?

Conversational Crossroads -- Love, Rose

Mapping my hybrid life on a personal, passion level involves drawings, notations, and novel writing.

What is a Turquoise Poppy? -- Tara Lutman Agacayak

Turquoise Poppy is about allowing your circumstances to guide your path while staying true to your inner compass.
Fear of Flying -- Sezin.org

My fear of flying signals my time to stay put, my time to understand how it feels to have wings while remaining grounded.
Path finder -- Love, Rose
What language do you use to describe your trajectory?
Ring my bell -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation
What comes first, the hybrid self or the hybrid life? Are our most resonant peers made or born?
Talking Point -- Skaian Gates
I found myself asking through the day were we sharing our hybrid lives because of our creativity or because of our experience of being expats.
A Thousand Ways -- Tales from Turkey
I've connected with 9 women with crazy, joyful, challenging hybrid lives so like my own. Lives that seem to hinge on one particular characteristic we all share - creativity.
Intimate Strangers -- Sezin.org
Dialogue 2010 was a meeting of kindreds, as women, as hybrids, as artists, as dreamers, believers.
Mapping My Worldview -- Skaian Gates
Two snapshots placed side-by-side to show how my worldview has changed.
What an Expat Leaves Behind - Judith van Praag
The expat hybrid lifestyle forms an audible cloud

Podcast availability will be made public this spring. In the meantime, join the discussion on Twitter using #dialogue2010, visit this Squidoo lens for up to the minute information, and join the Dialogue2010 Facebook page for future event information.

An entangled inheritance

I've been thinking a lot about the things that are supposed to come naturally, like knowing when to comfort and nurture. Thinking about grief. Thinking about the things that seem contrary to reason, like that my genetic offspring have sprouted feet that jump onto glass tables, climb bookshelves, and drop breakable momentos on the floor. Thinking about resolutions, evolution, and expectations interwoven with fears of failure not just limited to creative work.

A Mother Near or Far

Motherhood in Turkey began for me nearly three years ago, early in the morning in late October. In the history of motherhood, this is but a blip on a radar screen, but it connects me to a legion of mothers that have come before and will come after me. It is humbling to think as women we carry in our eggs future generations, even more so when we know that the grandmothers who birthed our mothers carried the egg that created us. Nestled inside us are generations. 

It's not Mother's Day. Today of all days I feel an unlikely spokesperson for artfully managing the affairs of home and work as Catherine Yığıt also explores in Housekeeping, though I know out of the turmoil can come something remarkable, like Alia El-Bermani shares in Artist and Mother. So that's why I'm sharing part of the Op/Ed I wrote for the Hürriyet Daily News for Mother's Day, 2009. Because the elixir, the elements (and not always happy ones) that connect mother and child happens on a social, cultural, and cellular level as well as an intangible one. This was my way to untangle my threads. 

We spent most of this week in the hospital, trying to find out what was causing my son to throw up, and finding that all of us, including our baby daughter, had been hit again by the flu. While at the hospital, I thought that this is parenting. This is motherhood. This is what we do every day – we get up and take on the vast risk that our children will experience life and that it won’t be fatal.

But what happens when the opposite occurs? When a mother leaves before a child is grown? As was the case with my own mother, who died when I was a mousy-haired, buck-toothed pre-kindergartner with a cherubic little blond brother who needed glasses. His glasses broke so many times at the playground from bigger kids bullying him. I was an overprotective sister, bullying in my own right, singling out the boys who hurt my brother, and being a tattletale. This did not go over well, and my brother was actually more resentful of my help. I was getting an early taste of mothering, letting someone you love and want to protect go and get hurt. 

I know I am still grieving for my mother, but not in the same way as I did years ago. I want to know what her life lessons would be, how she would react to my toddler slamming doors and drawing on the walls. I know I have a unique relationship to my mother. I talk to her, and sometimes she answers. Like the time I wrote to my godmother, and asked her, “How did you and mom learn to be so patient?” She instructed me: understand yourself first, and patience will follow. And then, at the end, a postscript: “Ask your mom and she will show you, but you need to be listening and watching.” My mother was of Jewish descent, and this is not the first time I’ve gotten the message that she is right here, beside me, a Jewish mother nudging me from the beyond.

Because I was born of her, I am also of Jewish descent, and now my daughter. My daughter can claim three religions to her name, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Is this perhaps the greatest gift a mother can give? I am not certain, but I do hope, that at least in some small way she is symbolic of the potential for disparate things to exist peacefully. What is passed from mother to child may only be revealed generations down the line.

Can inheritance be predicted in our childhood scrawls, as I intuit from E.Victoria Flynn's post? Can it be constructed in a life abroad with a new community and different resources, as Verity discusses?