Through a Naturist Lens

So, apparently June 21st is Naked Hiking Day. I for one will not be going hiking on the twenty-first. I have other things to attend to for the day. Besides, any day is a naked hiking day when the weather and opportunity presents itself. Today was my fourth such hiking day. Personally, I am not in favour of having June 21st as Naked Hiking Day. The day is already packed with meaning as the summer solstice. And for me, the day is also Canada’s National Aboriginal Day. Enough said, now back to naked hiking, or as I prefer to call it free hiking.

Why “free”? Free of clothing is an obvious answer, but it isn’t the whole of it. Besides, as you can see in the image, not all of the clothing is absent. I was wearing socks, proper shoes [not always the case] and a hat. Should I count the watch? Likely yes, as we say “wearing a watch.” The same goes for glasses. That leaves one to either conclude that this is not about being free of all clothing. For myself, it comes down to a “feeling.”

I love being barefoot and bareheaded but sometimes that isn’t a good plan. I live in semi desert country and there are too many dangers with walking with bare feet. Think cacti and sharp rocks and other objects that would do harm. The road to get to the wild prairie hills is laced with many sharp rocks. It is rare to find anyone walking. If not in a truck, there is the odd person who makes their way into the hills with an all-terrain vehicle. I’ve never met a solitary person out walking regardless of hiking footwear or barefoot.

The hat? Think of an endless sky, unbroken by clouds and the sun working hard to cook the earth. Remember, this is semi-desert country. Hats are protective and not a fashion statement. It would be different if I was in a different part of the world where being bare headed wasn’t an invitation to heat stress.

The watch? Truth be told, I rarely wear a watch. This watch is a Garmin. It tracks where, when, how long, the terrain, and a host of other information I ignore. I use the watch to record my distance for the most part since I can’t measure distance any other way when wandering up and down hills, across wild grasslands, or along the edges of farmed fields. I don’t have to do this, and often I don’t. However, sometimes it is good to know. Most times I don’t wear the watch.

Typically, when the weather is hot and I want to walk further, I take a backpack and my trekking poles. Water goes into the backpack along with my shorts and my top. Sometimes I even pack a small bag of nuts and raisins. Of course, my phone and wallet and car keys are also included if I have had to drive to a starting location, something I have to do if I want it to be a “free” hike.

Free is a feeling. The stride, the focus, the placing of one foot in front of the other without any thought intruding. In a way, it is my preferred way to meditate. I leave my monkey mind aside when the kilometres role by and the only thing that one has to be mindful of is the surface where one’s next step will be placed. Any idea of activism has vanished. Hiking is just the self and the environment.

Now, not all hiking while clothing free is free-hiking. Sometimes it is a social event. That is completely different. I do love walking with others. Okay, enough of this. I invite you to find a time and place for you to walk unencumbered of clothing. The experience is incredible.

I have to admit that when I travel, I take a lot of photos of statues. A few of my most favourite statues that I got up close and personal with and took photos were Neptune in Bologna, Italy and The Thinker in Paris, France. There has yet to be a country and/or city that I have visited that hasn’t had a number of statues to be admired. I am sure you have likely noticed the same thing,

You may have also noticed that so many of those statues had nude subjects – gods and goddesses seem to be the number one choice. However, more and more modern statues with nude subjects are about ordinary people though not any particular person. In my yard, I have two Buddhas – not nudes though both have little in the way of clothing as they meditate in the garden. I would like to put in a few classical nude statues, but in truth there is little room in my small yard.

Other statues usually depict a man who is important in historical terms. You can’t rewrite history, but what we put up as statues tells others more about us and our beliefs and value system than it does about history. An example: a statue of Hitler or any other historical person who is more infamous than famous. By putting up such a statue, we give honour to that personage.

By taking it down, we aren’t cancelling history or culture, we are choosing not to celebrate it. If one is creating a walk that has every president of the USA in bronze, then it is important to include all of the past presidents. But that aside, there isn’t any person past or present that I want in my garden. I am all about ideas such as children or an old man and woman.

That said, it would be kind of neat to have oneself as a statue. The real problem would be to choose which version of oneself that one would have carved in stone or cast in bronze. For myself, I’d rather not deal with that thought at all. I’d rather play it safe and have a statue that has a message rather than honour a particular person. And of course, I’d want the statue to have a nude body that was less perfect – a slight paunch for both male and female, wrinkles and or scars, faces that aren’t perfectly symmetrical – the anyman-anywoman.

Would you put a statue in your yard or home? If there was no objection from another person, especially a significant other, nor a matter of cost, what if any statue would you commission?

What a beautiful day to go for a walk in the hills. I had it all planned out. Camera, tripod, backpack, water, shirt and shorts of course. I also had my cellphone and wallet with me as I took my truck to a point about 16 kilometres from my small prairie town – eleven kilometres west and five south. I pulled up to a row of grain bins about a kilometre off the main grid. There was no action in the nearby fields – no farmer out spraying for weed.

Parking my truck beside the bins, the shirt went into the backpack and my shorts were tucked onto one of the shoulder straps of my backpack. The tripod was tied onto the outside of the small daypack with the DSLR camera tucked inside the backpack along with a bottle of water and the shirt.

It was then that I noticed that I didn’t have any hiking shoes or running shoes on my feet. All I had on were thin clog-like footwear. I shrugged and decided that I should at least walk a short distance in them rather than return back to my house and try again another day. My footwear is the same as these for the most part.

Well, by the time I had gone two kilometres to reach the end of what could pass for a road, I decided that I could try going further following the hint of a trail through the hills that lay ahead. At the 4 1/4 kilometre mark, my usual turn around point at the top of a hill with two antique pieces of field machinery, I stopped for a couple of photos and for half of my water, and to simply enjoy the incredible feeling of the sun on my body. I had no issues with my feet and had even forgotten that I wasn’t wearing hiking footwear.

On the way back to reach the dirt road, I stopped three times to take photos with flowers. At the gate area [the gate has been gone for years] I noticed that my shorts were not hanging from their usual place. For a moment I thought I would have to return tomorrow to retrace my route to find them. But then I had some doubts. What if I needed them on the dirt road to reach the grain bins because a farmer had arrived to do some spraying? How would I get from my truck to the house with no shorts on? The questions told me that I needed to retrace my route.

I walk-jogged the full two and a half kilometres back to the turn-around point where I found the shorts laying on the ground. Then, with them tightly grasped in my hand, I walk-jogged back to where I had left my backpack and camera. A eight and a half kilometre hike had turned into a thirteen and a half kilometre hike.

Back at the truck, I quickly stashed everything in side of it and began the drive back to my place. Three kilometres left to go, I stopped the truck to put on the pair of shorts. At that point, I noticed that the bottoms of my feet were hot and tender. They weren’t meant for hiking and jogging. I wonder if I will be able to go hiking tomorrow? If I can, I hope I can remember to keep my head focused on staying present long enough to grab the right footwear.

Maybe I should blame this post on the weather as it is a gloomy morning here on the Canadian prairies. Today’s post is different from my usual run-of-the-mill posts, more introspective and perhaps even critical. The weather certainly does have a tendency to have a person withdraw within where sunshine has the tendency to have a person leave the protective shell to engage with the outer world.

As some of you may know, I have a history with mental-health issues. However, I don’t want to get into those issues here other than to perhaps serve as a warning that a trigger or two may lay in the words to come. Rather, I want to focus on the present. As a person with a significant background in psychology, which includes teaching psychology and being a part-time mental health counsellor over a number of decades, you would think that by the age of seventy-plus I would have my shit together. Sadly, that’s not the case. Saying that, I have to add that I am mostly in a decent place, and that I am not at risk as was the case decades ago. Likely, there is no cure for a fractured psyche.

The Covid19 pandemic must also be figured into the mix. Like everyone else, life had been turned upside down because of Covid19. Unlike most people, the need to be socially distant has not been a hardship for me with the exception of not being able to see my grandchildren and adult children for too many months. I am an introvert. People overwhelm me at times. Even playing with my grandchildren and socialising with my children and their spouses wears me out leaving me exhausted at the end of each day.

So much for the background material. Now, it’s time to get into the main subject matter. Sky Clad Therapy? Is there really such a thing? In my personal circumstances, I can honestly answer “Yes!” However, I am a realist and know that for most people, the answer would be a resounding “No! No! No! Are you out of your freaking mind?” I know at an academic level that there is evidence that nudity does help some people deal with some of their mental-health issues. Maslow said as much and one of his followers, Paul Bindrim led a number of experimental group therapy efforts where nudity in a pool was a requirement.

Other psychologists also tried to incorporate nudity as a tool to help the healing process. Aileen Goodson, author of Therapy, Nudity and Joy has gathered a significant number of other efforts to affirm that for some, nudity helps with the healing process. As a former mental-health practitioner I quickly learned that each client had unique needs regardless of the wounding they had suffered to bring them to counselling. There is no one-size-fits-all therapy model. So yes, Sky Clad Therapy is real.

On one of my trips to my home naturist campground, my significant other accompanied me. It didn’t take her long to note that it appeared that everyone at the site seemed to be wounded in some way, a fact that helped her understand what I had been telling her. She is not a nudist by any stretch of the imagination but is also not closed-minded. She knows first hand that nudity is a vital part of why I have been able to become a healthier person.

Periodic attempts on my part to shelve nudity in an attempt to fit better into a normal textile world always end up in various stages of failure with her saying, “Take of your damned clothes.” Now, as many of my readers know, I push boundaries when I am nude, but that is a different issue for a different time.

Now, what about a psychological naturist? Why do I focus on the psychology of naturism? To be honest, Psychology had nothing to do with naturism for me back in the eighties and nineties when I was adding yet another degree to my CV. As an educator, I often found myself counselling some of my students. Most teachers find themselves cast into the role of untrained counsellors, so that wasn’t something strange. However, I didn’t want to just wing it based on intuition.

Of course, nothing studied at the university or in follow up courses at training institutes or in other certificate programs had anything about naturism as a healing strategy. But, on consideration of our collective society, this wasn’t something too surprising. Even today, though many are now trying to normalise naturism, mainstream psychology keeps a healthy distant from its dubious past. So why do I combine psychology and naturism? Is it just about me and trying to justify who I am?

Good questions, but the most important question that is hounding me at present is “Why not just give up this whole nudity thing and make your life so much easier?” So why don’t I? Why don’t I just delete the nude photos in my archives and all my social media presence as a naturist? Why does this blog site even exist? What’s the point? I mean, it would make my partner’s life that much easier and that has to count for something. As well, it would remove some stress on my neighbours who have to put up with occasional sightings of the naked old man. They are lovely people but I am informed that it does cause them stress. If I could somehow morph into a different person who is content with wearing clothing and being more sociable, I would likely have a friend or two.

I don’t have friends in my face-to-face world. I don’t remember ever having friends that I could call real friends. I wasn’t even friends with myself. I am friendly and smile and speak gently with no put downs of others. I am a nice guy. It was my survival strategy as a child that has continued to the present. The “me” I keep hidden from others is still there, buried beneath whatever role or circumstance of life that presents itself.

In the world of naturism, in a naturist venue, it gets easier for me. I often imagine that I might even have a friend if I only stayed in one place long enough. A week or less doesn’t cut it. In the world of social media, it is a different story – at least I think so. I have friends. Perhaps they are real friends, perhaps not. But friends or no friends isn’t the issue. The issue is whether or not I can, should, or could give up the world of naturism to live a more peaceful life.

My answer to this is a poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Is this the supreme act of selfishness when family, friends, neighbours, and my significant other need something different from me? Feel free to offer your answers.

It is a rainy morning this morning and it appears that it will be a rainy weekend as I spend the next three days with my youngest grandchildren in their home. Here, the first two hours of the morning belong to me as everyone is still sleeping. I finally have the ambition to sit still and do some writing. Taking this time to talk with you became my first priority. I have been delaying this post until the conditions were ripe for its creation.

Looking at old photos in my journals before Covid19, took me back in time to think about how much the world has changed. My guess is that it isn’t only the world that has changed. Each of us is not the same person we were before the pandemic no matter how much we would protest. Social media has had a lot to do with this though can social media be considered the main reason for how the world has changed.

As naturists or nudists or just as people who prefer to not wear clothing when we can get away with it, time seems to have done one of two things – shoved us deeper into closets where we sneak moments of nudity; or, we have pushed the edges of our own boundaries to search out more and more freedom. Personally, I take more chances with when and where I allow my clothing to fall off.

Yet still, I remain well aware that there are times and places where going nude is not going to do me any good at all. There is a real world out there and it isn’t going to let us get away with total freedom of expression. So, that has us, as a collective, build virtual communities on Twitter and a few other scarce social media platforms.

Nudity, virtual social nudity, is an act of personal freedom that should be celebrated with others who are supportive. Hiding in the closet, fearful of being found while nude doesn’t have to be one’s condition. Owning one’s natural body is not a capital crime. Take some time and discover the joy and freedom that being clothing free can offer you.

Just a note: You don’t have to show pictures of yourself to enjoy that freedom. Leave the camera behind and just experience. That is enough … at least for now.

It’s morning time and I am sitting on the deck listening to the birds sing in the sunshine. The robins are especially noisy with a few grackles trying to compete for sound space. I have the yard to myself at this time of day with no little kids visiting their grandparents on either side of my home and yard. Breakfast waits until as late as possible while I enjoy a windless morning though the temperature is only 9 Celsius.

The forecast for the day is +23 with only a breeze in sunshine. That means we will go for a walk into the countryside later this morning, a clothed walk. Once that is done, I am getting out my trusty rake to rid the front lawn of winter thatch before mowing the lawn. That has been delayed because of a lack of rainfall this spring.

I get to go for my second Covid19 vaccination tomorrow morning, something that I have been looking forward to for some time. I have a strong feeling that I will need it as we are on the cusp of opening everything up on the Canadian prairies. All but one of my children and grandchildren, with the exception of the 2 and 4 year old’s, have at least their first vaccination done. I am so looking forward to the day the border between Canada and the USA opens up so that I can visit once again our middle child’s family. Zoom isn’t the same as face-to-face.

Relationships. Our lives are centred around our relationships, and I don’t mean only the “couple” versions of relationships. Extended family, neighbours, work mates, and even those people whom we could easily categorise as undesirables. I have to add to this list, people who are no longer in our lives but whom have touched our lives in one manner or other.

If a person ends up in therapy, there is always an issue about relationships. Our issues, whether we seek mental-health therapy options or not, are grounded on these relationships that go back to the first interactions between infant and adult. No one escapes these issues. How we deal with them is a different story.

I am bringing up this topic because of my recent foray into my older journals. I am trying to clean them up so that they aren’t messy, at least the journals that exist in digital form. The paper-based journals are a different story. They will remain as they are. The digital journals often have images included. The words tell a story and the images amplify the stories told. I guess you could say that a person’s blog site or Twitter feed, and cousins such as Facebook and Instagram do the same. It is amazing what is revealed, even when one doesn’t intend on revealing closely guarded glimpses into one’s inner psyche.

Do you journal your life? How do you tell your story in your own words? Social media? Do you rummage around the past through images? What do you avoid and why? How do you process what you find in those words and images?

Somethings to think about.

This morning, I woke up early as usual to find that it had been raining for a good portion of the night. It was a very gentle rain that had filled our rain gauge to the half inch mark. After the first cup of coffee, the idea to put our houseplants, which are predominately cactus plants, outside so that they could be nourished by the rain was made. Though it was only 8 Celsius, I carried them out wearing my best waterproof outfit, my skin. My bare feet did get quite cool, but the plants will love me for the effort.

This is the first rain of the year in our corner of the universe where the drought has meant that there is a fire ban in place. Hopefully, enough rain falls to allow campers to have camp fires. The gentle rain is expected continue until midmorning tomorrow. I went back out to fill every pail that I own with rainwater from the rain barrels so that the water will be available for the garden should we return to an extended period of no rain. Water is life. Even the plants in a desert need water from time to time.

The idea of a mother nature that is also the goddess of the sea, is as ancient as human memory, an archetypal image that is embedded in all of us below the level of conscious knowledge. In so many cultures, this archetype is depicted as nude. It is only in the modern world that we somehow have cloaked the goddess in material to hide her. Not only do we pretend that mother nature is shamed by her natural nudity, we drape all young mothers-to-be as their children are born.

It is hard to imagine a goddess of the sea and the mother of the earth that would feel shame, yet that is what art now demands. The same is true for the god of the sea. Like his consort, he must now be rendered sexless. A loin cloth or an artfully draped swath of material somehow becomes part of his costume, even when he is in the sea. Modern sensibilities demand nothing less as the thought of gods and goddesses being nude, skinny dipping, and engaged in creating the world is too much to handle. Naked dreams send them scurrying to see a therapist with worries that they are somehow becoming perverts in their minds.

Life emerged from the sea. Each new life also emerges from a sea of its own, an umbilical sea. And, every single life form emerges into the world without artfully draped material hiding their nudity. Yet, almost at the moment of birth, human babies are swaddled and not because of the air temperature. It is not seemly for a baby to be naked. Humans are strange and irrational beings who need to feel the rain on their bared bodies, get in touch with their roots, the archetypal gods and goddesses who had no fear of their bodies or their sexuality.

The world has changed over the past year and something tells me that it will never go back to the normal, whatever that might be, of the world before Covid19. When I leave my house to go to get a few groceries or a needed something or other from the lumberyard, I check to make sure I have a mask with me. At times, I find that I have walked a few blocks towards a destination, only to have to go back home and get a mask when I realise that there is no mask in my pocket. Strangely, it is as if without a mask when in contact with others, I am vulnerably naked. 

Strangely, for many naturists, there are two sides of this question. The second side is “Am I missing out on something?” How do I mean that? Well, I can best explain by giving examples. When I drive from point A to point B, I see spots where I could be safely nude without drawing undue attention of others. As I pass that spot, I have this tiniest sense of loss at not experiencing that opportunity to be nude outdoors. It’s irrational as the journey is purposeful, and not a pilgrimage to another nude experience. Yet, there is always that “what if I stopped” thought that distracts me from the primary purpose of the drive.

A second example. I go to a neighbour’s home for a glass of wine and hors d’oeurvres. In all, perhaps there are four or five gathered. All of us have had at least one vaccination for Covid19, all of us are “senior” citizens, and all have seen me nude in my yard or house at some point or other. None have complained to me or made a fuss about seeing me nude.

Yet, the charade of me being anything but a nudist gets played out with me wondering, “what if I took off my clothes?” It’s that thought that infuriates me as the primary purpose is the social moment with others, none of whom are even slightly interested in nudity.

As I said above, the world has changed and it will not return to the way it used to be. Over the past year and a bit, more people have doffed their clothing to work in comfort from their homes, only putting on an item of clothing to cover their upper half when on a video conference. The assumption is that if your chest is bare, then all of you is bare.

Of course, there are “accidents” such as happened with a virtual sitting of government when person A didn’t realise that his camera was on as he returned from a run and stripped out to get ready for his participation in a virtual sitting of the House. With so many feeling liberated to be nude within the confines of their own homes, will there be that urge to expand opportunities to be nude? My best guess is, “yes!”

Will other people really care one way or the other if they see someone nude? Again, I think more people will just shrug their shoulders and perhaps give a grin while they go on with their own lives. Of course, there are others who will be offended. But then again, they will always be offended by anything that differs.

So, “what am I missing” can be answered with a thin ray of light that states, “maybe nothing.”

I have been busy with a number of things, some of which were necessary and some of which were diversionary. The latest project was to remove the raspberry patch because it was damaged by deer invading our yard this past winter. I am turning over the soil as the plan is to put in some potatoes, spinach, zucchini, and squash. I hope to finish the turning of the soil by tomorrow at some point.

Yesterday, I raised the fence between my yard and her driveway, one of the entry points for the deer. The old fence was raised about a half-foot. I will make sure that there is no large snowbank to climb to make the jump into the yard that much easier. Through the wooden slats, I was open to the view of passing traffic, as well as to the view of my friendly neighbour who has seen me nude, perhaps too often from her point of view.

Two days prior to this, I raised the fence, seen in grey wood in the background, which was the primary entry point. These boards went up a good threequarters of a foot. And yes, I wore tan-through Kiniki briefs to do the work. There is no need to frighten neighbours with so much of the fence taken down.

Yard work was only part of my busyness, the productive part to be sure. I had put my major piece of writing on hold as I focused Zen-like, on compiling a summary of my life as a naturist. That work began it’s journey in December 2004 and made it’s way to the summer of 2019 before I stopped.

Photos make a huge part of that story. I felt it was necessary to put it all together as my “journals” are spotty. I keep a naturist journal, and have done so since around 2009. However, over the years, many of the journals were tossed into the fire, so-to-speak.

Not only were the photos that accompanied each entry nudes, but the entries themselves disclosed too much as I felt it at the time. I feared discovery and what the consequences of the disclosures. Of those original naturist journals, just the last two years are relatively complete. 2017 was totally disappeared. If you know my story, then you will be familiar with the messiness of my life. It’s all in the three volume autobiography.

Of course, that soon led me to searching through my archive of nude photos to help fill in the holes for the new story. Naturally, I found holes there as well. I am able to find a number of the disappeared photos via the “allphotos” feature with Windows. Rather than explain that, I will leave it to you to Google to fill in the blanks. With all of the rummaging around in the past for these tasks, depression decided to accent the experience. I’m still not out of the depression woods, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, it isn’t all shadowy.

Somehow, that and a rare visit during Covid19 season to visit my son’s home and family helps account for my absence, not that it really requires any explanation. Being able to see my grandchildren after a five month hiatus was balm for my soul. And that, is it for now.

It’s WNGD in the northern hemisphere, unlike the southern hemisphere where winter is preparing to make its own debut. The truth is, I was in the garden two weeks ago, wearing nothing but sunshine. Today, it was quite cool outside, with wind and showers on and off. It definitely wasn’t World Naked Gardening Day here. On the up side is the fact that I got to spend a few days with my youngest grandchildren, something not so easily to accomplish during this Covid19 pandemic. For four days we are their caregivers as their parents are busy with life.

The hours race by at breakneck speed from the moment the first one wakes until the last one is tucked in for the night. I had thought that my hiking would be on pause until my return home but the two year old loves being outside. Between the stroller and the escaping to wander free of the stroller’s seat belts, I have two days of four plus kilometre excursions. Added to it is a walking nine-hole golf round with the eleven year old. Yesterday, the highlight was having the freshly turned earth trickle through his fingers. This was followed with some time collecting twigs and dead grass which he placed in the stroller to take home.

Today, he and I went for another long walk. Before we headed back to the house, we met up with his sister with the objective of collecting spruce cones for painting. There is small green space behind their home where we go in search of forest treasures. When I think about it, there is no doubt in my mind that this has indeed been a Garden day. The natural world is a garden and we have been celebrating the natural world.

I hope your world is in touch with Mother Nature today and for as many days as you can.