Most are familiar with the gnawing sensation that there must be more to our lives than we are currently experiencing. Our inner whisper of wisdom pushes us towards the people and places that help us feel really and truly content, searching for a way to rise above the superficiality of the world and find a sense of purpose. Sometimes, it takes losing who we think we are to become our true selves.
The widely popular 2006 memoir “Eat, Love, Pray” by Elizabeth Gilbert is a charming story of a woman hungry for truth, satiating her appetite on the other side of the world. “Turtle Feet” follows that same soul-searching template, but with twice the attitude, and no fluffy, hippy crap and inevitable happy endings.
Bulgarian musical prodigy Nikolai Grozni was an accomplished and reasonably content man. He was a jazz musician and student at the Berklee College of Music, wildly popular with the ladies for his musical prowess and good European looks, and never in financial or social distress. But, suddenly, on a day otherwise insignificant, somewhere between his bed and the bathroom, he became disillusioned with his life.
The unsettling experience of feeling void of purpose begins Grozni’s spiritual memoir. After the loss of his life’s meaning, Grozni forsakes his studies at Berklee and adopts the strict life of a Buddhist monk. Hoping to obtain some spiritual answers, he cuts his hair, trades his blue jeans for saffron robes, swears off sex, and moves to a Buddhist ashram in the Indian town of Dharamsala — a place of complete spiritual immersion.
Surprisingly, Grozni is not enchanted by the peaceful ways of his new life. He is often irked by the seemingly over-simplified spiritual theories of Buddhism, the chaos of the area surrounding Dharamsala, and the ease with which the locals accept their impoverished lives. Yet, he remains in India, for reasons even he cannot articulate. His attempts to explain his drastic life change are riveting; Grozni describes the making, and later the unmaking, of his monk-Avatar, with a surprisingly irreverent perspective, which is nurtured by his unlikely new friend: a womanizer from Sarajevo.
His story is rich in detail, sarcasm and crude humor, and is everything not expected from a Buddhist monk. Few modern memoirs can rival his passages about the nature of existence and the mind. Grozni is unafraid of gritty prose and exposes himself in his most vulnerable times. Readers are introduced to his new and unusual world in which meaningful religion and abstract nonsense are one, and spiritual discipline and worldly indulgence collide. Soul-searching isn’t the simple, romantic journey that movies make it out to be; according to Grozni, it shouldn’t be.
