Maurice Leavitt | Personal Essays, Reflections and Travel Writing

Personal Essays – Travel Reflections

& Creative Pursuits

After 25 years of culinary education shaping young chefs in college kitchens, I’ve traded stainless steel for spice markets, van explorations, and quiet mornings with a journal. Here, you’ll discover my travels through bustling night markets and local farms, and thoughtful essays on life’s deeper currents—from the vulnerabilities of family dynamics and the quiet power of sarcasm, to the transformative grace of intimacy and attention in a divided world.

This isn’t a how-to guide or polished manifesto. It’s my honest and raw thinking on grief and growth, love as reciprocity, the myths about power and belonging, and the simple joy of asking for what we want. Influenced by early internet musings and writers like David Brooks, these pieces trace a journey from exile to connection, inviting you to pause, reflect, and perhaps find a spark of your own.

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Waking Eros

A somatic philosophy and education. Exploring the waking of erotic energy as a influential life force – desire, creativity, and embodied aliveness—especially later in life. Recognizing the body’s sensation as a way to stay present and a refusal to dissociate. Where intimacy is a giving and receiving of our full attention.

Drop me a line if something resonates. Let’s share the aftertaste of being human.

Glimpse of the Journey

Start Here

The Brain Dump

Let’s call this what it is: a space for mental gymnastics, restless questions, and the occasional dignified rant. Writing has never been my idea of fun. As a kid, it felt like punishment. As an adult, it still kind-of does — except now. I’m making the choice to be in public, with no teacher to grade me.

Why? Because something shifted. The excuses got stripped away. Grief burned away the illusions. Travel — and life’s challenges — forced me to notice what’s hidden in plain sight. I realized that avoiding the blank page was just another way of avoiding myself.

This isn’t a lifestyle blog or a tidy “how-to” guide. It’s messier than that. You’ll find personal essays about connection and exile, markets and morality, sexuality and eroticism, belonging and betrayal. The through-line is simple … a refusal to look away from the things that make us human, even when they are unsettling.

Because here’s the truth: human desire and dignity are not opposites. Erotic energy is not something to tame or exile; it’s the same current that runs through intimacy, creativity, and relationships. When we separate sex from spirit … body from belonging, or honesty from love, we become divided — and we call the division a normal part of life. Which it is not.

Some will say I am overthinking. I call it practice. Practice in asking better questions. Practice in refusing to live by someone else’s value system. The practice of “loving well”.
If something here resonates — or unsettles you — good. That means you’re alive.
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