Hedonists do not avoid difficult things.
We do not float from pleasure to pleasure, collecting sensations like flowers, never stopping long enough to ask why.
The Season of Reckoning arrives with muddy boots and dirty hands shouting:
Pleasure is sacred!
Which means it must be examined.
The thaw has already begun and things that were buried beneath Winter are surfacing.
Not all of them are beautiful:
Some arrive limping.
Some arrive snarling.
Some arrive wearing the faces of old lovers, old wounds, old mistakes.
Good. Let them come.
We do not seek purity or escape.
This is the Season of Reckoning, of honesty.
A Cyrenaian Hedonist does not merely ask, What do I want?
A Cyrenaian Hedonist asks, Why does this call to me? Why do I chase what I chase?
Why does the leash make my pulse quicken?
Why does surrender feel like freedom?
Why does humiliation taste sweet?
These questions are not pleasure’s obstacle, but its foreplay and its deepening.
This is the work.
The sexy work.
The sacred work.
Every honest answer brings us closer to ourselves.
We are invited to descend into the shadows.
To sit across the table from our monsters.
To buy them a drink.
To ask what they have been trying to tell us all these years.
Some carry wounds.
Some carry wisdom.
Most carry both.
And when the conversation is finished, when the shadows have spoken, when the body has confessed what the mouth has been unable to say, pleasure becomes something far more than escape, distraction, or anesthesia.
It becomes intimacy.
With others.
With the body.
With the self.
This is the (Shadow)Work of Reckoning.
And few things are more erotic.
The Cyrenaian Hedonic church 
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