For me, the essence of life is taking a breath and feeling my lungs fill, my ribs expand, and the skin grows taut. It is knowing that in that instant, the world is part of me and, when I exhale, that I am part of it. It is about partaking in all aspects of life as they connect me to my own existence — it is about pleasure in a moment and knowing in that moment that I am alive and part of something greater.
When I say that I dedicate this blog and this site to “hedonism,” it doesn’t mean pleasure in an abstracted and unruled context. Don’t get me wrong — the things I’ll write about are all about the pleasure that they give. But there are limits — and indeed, I think there should be limits on most things. Anything done to excess, well, it’s an extreme, and it is in the extremes that things go awry. Some might say that this makes me an “ethical hedonist.” I can live with that. I’m sure over time it will become clear in my words and ramblings that I’m not much on labels, but if that fits, I’m good with that. This site isn’t about sex on a beach surrounded by strangers … but it is about pleasure and our bodies, connected to minds and spirits, which is a huge part of how we connect to pleasure.
The pages and posts that will follow are about three subjective categories that are meaningful to me and which define the big buckets in life that give me pleasure: eating, writing, and photography. They define sensual distinctions that feed my whole. Eating and all things food, including wine and beer, feed my corporal being, my physical, my primal self.
Photography, is a process. In that moment when my lens clicks and I’m shooting, I capture moments, ideas, expressions, and observations. It feeds my aesthetic — out there, in the world, in that physicality outside my own physical being, there lies beauty in all things: in nature, the animals with which we share custodianship, art, architecture, people and places. And what my eye sees and what my camera captures, and captures well, I will share.
Writing feeds my mind and my soul. Those that know me know that this is where I live 90% of the time. I lose myself in other things like music and exercise and at times in my photography and cooking, but when I want to immerse myself in my mind, then I turn to words on the page. I’m not sure where things will evolve here with respect to my written words. Unlike the cooking and photography, my words are truly my soul lay bare and in that instant, I’m vulnerable and naked. Perhaps that is the reason why there is such pleasure in the English language for me … but it will take time and trust to share these parts with the world that awaits their emergence.
And so it begins, a life shared and seen through the eyes of a hedonist, myself ….
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