As I mentioned earlier this week, I return to the book The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. I am blessed that in our Arabic-phobic world, poets and writers and artists from the middle-eastern world found a home in our western hearts.
As promised, I am turning to the poem, “On Clothes” for today’s post. Interestingly enough, what Gibran had to say about clothes matches both my preference and Joy’s preferred state. That said, neither of us, for a moment, believe that being clothing-free is a twenty-four/seven lifestyle in our world which includes others who don’t share the same values. Now, the poem.
“Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment.
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, p. 33
It is hard to believe that Gibran wrote these words more than a 100 years ago, for the words resonate so deeply with just about every thing that I have come to know about naturism. It isn’t about clothing though clothing is the subject. Rather, it is about getting to know oneself and then having the courage to be oneself rather than disguising the self to “fit in.”
“For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of the night.”
There is a real need for our human spirit to be set free, rather than caged, even if the cages of clothing and houses are the best that money can buy, for as Gibran tells us: “your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.”