Through a Naturist Lens

At 1:30 this afternoon, local time in Ecuador, it is a sunny 29C. We are delaying our beach walk until later in the afternoon when the sun is less intense so that we don’t have to use as much sunscreen. Yesterday afternoon, we went for a six kilometre walk along the beach before heading into the sea for a swim in the surf. It was the perfect beginning of three months in Ecuador. We finished off the day with a meal with a bottle of red wine at our favourite restaurant in the fishing village we call home during the winter. Life just doesn’t get that much better, especially when you get to do this with the woman I have loved for forty-eight years.

For the next while, I want to talk about love from a Jungian point of view. Of course, that doesn’t really explain everything that there is to say about love as there are as many faces of love as there are people, and perhaps a few more as well. I will draw upon the book Eros and Pathos, by Aldo Carotenuto as I take you and myself on this journey. So, with that said, I take these following words from the introduction as my starting point:

“It can’t be denied that the condition we assume to be normal – the love that lasts a lifetime, two partners who grow old together in continuing love – is in reality so rare as to practically constitute an anomaly.”Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos, p. 7

I have to admit that it hasn’t always been easy and often, both of us has on more than one occasion been ready to end our relationship. To be honest, love often was an intense exercise in suffering. However, stubbornness more than anything, kept us hanging on and working to get passed the yawning caverns that were waiting to swallow what thin threads of love that remained.

“Too many unions are based on pathological need where each partner represents the other’s sickness.”Carontenuto, p. 7

For my wife and I, it was love at first sight, literally. I had stopped in a town I had no intention of stopping in, because it was raining too hard [I was hitch-hiking en route to Salt Spring Island]. This beautiful young woman served me in the restaurant I had taken shelter in from the rain. I ordered, we talked, and three hours later I proposed and she accepted. It was the September long weekend in 1970. Of course, neither of us knew anything about the other. There was something in both of us that the other unconsciously hooked onto, something we project [our unconscious needs] onto the other. When that projection is cast, when it is received [hooked] and a reciprocal projection is received in turn, there is love-at-first-sight.

Our literature and mythology talk about love-at-first-sight. The stories like Romeo and Juliette and Tristan and Isolde, are just two examples of humans captivated, caught in the throes of this powerful love. In all such stories, the lovers are star-crossed with the ending being tragic. Consciousness plays no part in the dynamic. Yet somehow, my wife and I escaped this tragedy. Why? Perhaps, it had to do with how we navigated through the early stages of our relationship. I risked being nude in her presence. Boundaries were stretched. Layers of the unknown were exposed and made conscious.

It’s New Year’s Eve, my last full day at home here on the Canadian prairies before I fly off for a winter of sunshine and warmer temperatures in Ecuador. The backpacks have been filled with what we will need for three months, not a lot as we don’t wear much.

I am fortunate in that I will be able to live clothing-free for the most part within our casa which we rent, in Ecuador. Naturally, once we leave the casa, I wear clothing as it is a normal fishing village, not a naturist village. I accept that and actually respect that fact. The beach is not clothing optional, but a community beach meaning I will have to wear a bathing suit. I wish it could be otherwise, but that is the reality I live with in Ecuador.

As I said to open this post, it is New Year’s Eve. It’s a time when I look back at my naturist connections, whether they are online or face-to-face. I am blessed to have good friends who are naturists, such as Melvin and Sandy pictured here. This particular friendship has been growing over a few years and has resulted in both being frequently found in my posts here. There is a hope that 2019 will have us meet face-to-face.

This past year, I have been able to increase my presence in the world of naturism in various ways. With my friends, Will Forest and Paul Z. Walker, a Naturist Fiction site has come into existence. The three of us are writers of naturist fiction. I met Will a few years ago in Mexico after he had edited my naturist poetry books. Paul has been a writing buddy via NaNoWriMo for a few years. There is a real hope that Paul will become a face-to-face friend in the future when my wife and I travel to the Netherlands for another of our walking adventures.

In the early summer, I lost a face-to-face naturist friend, Brian Wappel. He was the president of the Prairie Sun Naturist group. In August, I became a Board member of the FCN, the national naturist federation for Canada. I managed to visit Green Haven, and a new-to-me site in Manitoba called Naturist Legacy.

Overall, it has been a good year with my naturist novel Small Company of Pilgrims having sold 126 paperback copies, and It’s Complicated selling 48 paperback copies. I have written another novel that will come out in 2019 once I come up with a title for the book and a cover. And now, here are the sales numbers for all-time for my books:

1. A Small Company of Pilgrims – 248 print copies, and 416 eBook copies = 664
2. It’s Complicated – 96 print copies, and 17 eBook copies = 113
3. Naked Poetry 1 – 29 print copies, and 370 eBook copies = 399 *
4. Naked Poetry 2 – 24 print copies, and 19 eBook copies = 43 *
5. Naked Poetry 3 – 16 print copies, and 10 eBook copies = 26 *

And of course, there is this place, A Canadian Naturist which has managed to survive a drastic clean-up that saw it become a place with a bit more depth, and less trivial as a result. I have to thank so many who have allowed me to feature them and their images in the posts during the past year. And lastly, I want to thank you, my readers for your presence. Without you, this blog site would have never been resurrected from the ashes.

Happy New Year to each and every one of you.

I have quite a number of “friends” who take self-images, some of them selfies while other images are more composed using timers and such. With very few exceptions, everyone has a number of “those” images which straddle or cross the line of what “others” would deem as being “appropriate” nude images, especially in the naturist communities. Even a number of those who protest an image such as mine which has an awakened sexuality to it, have similar images of themselves – and counted among my friends-with-nude-photos, are both men and women.

I have experienced, especially in the case of men, a chorus of voices who want such images purged from the Internet, citing how such images negatively impact the core values of naturism. The naturist community wants to desperately accepted by the broader community and will censor its members [pun intended] to ensure that the larger public will be appeased. In the case of women, I have witnessed more than a few being censored for displaying too much.

The community slips into shaming these women. Now, in the naturist communities, the resulting behaviour has many women wearing sarongs so as to appease those who demand that we are naked, while at the same time, protecting our image as non-sexual nudists. I know, it is ludicrous.

I am not a threat to others. If anything, despite what the image just above would have you believe, I am judged a kind and sensitive man. During the years I was an administrator, I was judged too soft to be a leader. Yet the people I led respected me and felt safe under my leadership. Still, the image says something else about me. Why am I defiant, potentially even angry in the photo?

There was no one else anywhere near other than passing autos just out of view. As a psychotherapist, I had to pay attention to the image, my image. Just like I listen to my dreams [and those of others when I am at work as a therapist], I knew that something about my inner psyche was being exposed.

Having the fortunate experience of meeting like-mined people in cyberspace, the world of social media, I am learning that women are experiencing much the same thing. When we look at ourselves through our images, we discover things we never knew about ourselves, even if the images are tourist selfies in front of monuments and waterfalls.

We become more conscious of who we are. Armed with that knowledge, we aren’t passive victims of the inner darkness within each of us. It was a good thing that I didn’t censor either image as they show me aspects of me that would otherwise remain unknown. Yet, when it comes to publishing blog posts here on the Internet, we either self-censor our images or have others who have the authority censor them in spite of our conscious [or unconscious] intentions.

The truth is, it really isn’t the broader community or the naturist community that plays the largest role of censoring our images, or how we live even if only a few hours a day, as nudists and naturists. The loudest voice that attempts to shame us, to contain us … well, it is ourselves. We allow the voices of parents and teachers and community to take up residence in our heads and we then amplify their voices. We only do this when we are uncertain about trusting ourselves. You know, the old “Father Knows Best!” kind of dictum. Sometimes we amplify the voices of our mates who are not naturists or nudists. “Thy will, not mine,” prevails.

Yet, despite all of these competing voices, within and without, we take the photos or have them taken of us, for us. It is within these images that we begin to see below the level of “noise” and thus find the self that lies hidden, a more authentic self that is sensitive, honest, frightened, angry, loving, an artist, a warrior, and even nobility. It is all there in the photographs before the censor puts in an appearance, especially the ones we don’t dare show to the “public.”

We see this captured in the face of the images taken. What do the eyes tell us of that moment when we risked all, when the censor within is silenced, if only for a few moments while the shutter clicks capturing the truth?

It’s almost a new year, the darkest time of the year. Even though the lights are on, there always seem to be more shadow than light. At my home, like so many other homes, Christmas lights are turned on for the evening and the early morning, when we are awake. We turn them off when going to bed, leaving the house in complete darkness, except for the blinking blue and green lights of various electronics.

It’s the season of post-Christmas blues when the bits of light in the darkness can’t seem to cut through the shadows that slip in to our lives once the hoped for magic of the holidays has proven as elusive as trying to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus. We are left deflated in spirits and inflated with too much eaten, especially those sweet things that tempt when we are most vulnerable which then leave us even more depressed because of sugar-induced lows.

In the past, at those bleaker moments, I used to turn to my guitar, usually played quietly the shadows, like Joy illustrates above. The music becomes a meditative prayer that washes over the soul, as long as it is soft and gently rhythmical – no harsh volume or racing tempos. And then, with the spirit within stilled, I would breathe.

This morning I opened up Pema Chodron’s book, When Things Fall Apart to find some wisdom that I felt was needed after seeing a cartoon that ridiculed pre-Christmas shoppers with the fact that all the presents they had bought were now 60% off. Such a cartoon – I can’t find it now, so I chose the image above to better illustrate that post-Christmas “let-down” which highlights the dark side of our “crazy mixed-up minds.” Chodron talks about meditation:

“it’s such a help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We’re letting it blur the sharp-corners of self-criticism and complaint.”Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart, p. 140.

It’s the Night Before Christmas, the darkest time of the year. This year, a full moon threatens that darkness. And with the light of that full moon, there is a thin ray of hope that awakens. In just two days, my children and grandchildren will fill the house with all the promise of tomorrow.

I have to admit that it seems that humanity is also facing its darkest times here in North America and other places on the planet. We are inundated with storms from a Mother Nature who has begun to despair as well. Our politicians are all about finding our enemies under every rock and encouraging us to build walls around us to keep the nameless enemies at bay.

It is amazing to me how the appearance of just one child in our house brings light and hope. The thought of my children and grandchildren in the house, laughing, eating, playing, and revelling in the moment of family, pushes the darkness back.

What is more amazing is that within each of us, there is an innocent child, often one who has been wounded. Yet in spite of the wounding, still has hope, still believes in the magic and power of goodness. Merry Christmas to you and your inner child.

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903

George Bernard Shaw embodied this rejection of shame, rejecting sublimation to the collective unconscious which brings out the worst in humans in communities across the world. It doesn’t take much for neuroses to become embedded into a culture.

We gather together in communities, primarily out of fear of being alone. We view the others outside of our communities as inferior or even enemies. Within our communities, those who don’t accept the collective neuroses as moral truths are shamed with the intention of having conformity, unity. In the end, no one naturally fits into the collective paradigm and as a result we end up with individuals who suffer in shame, in self-doubt and expend a lot of money and energy to hide their natural differences from the average modern man.

Freedom from shame, a state of being that can best be thought of as a free spirit, a person who rises above the collective, or as Friedrich Nietzsche called this type of person, an overman, a superman. Today we all credit the beginnings of modern social nudism to the FKK movement. In reality, nudity was a normal part of life in Europe until the 18th century. Driven underground and declared an act of deviancy, it took a rebellion of youth encouraged by Nietzsche to live in harmony with nature, to embrace nudism, meditation and natural healing to bring nudism to the modern world, in spite of modern man who was and remains, ashamed of his naked body.

Shaw wrote the words above more than a hundred years ago. As I read them, I realised that nothing has changed, unless we have moved even deeper into a collective culture of shame and being offended by differences.

Here on the Canadian prairies, the snow came early. However, the temperatures have decided to remain rather pleasant, though on occasion it does get rather windy which makes it feel even colder outdoors.

So why go outdoors while nude and capture that in a photo? What is it that has so many who are comfortable enough with their bodies to take that challenge? Of course, I can’t answer for anyone else. There are likely as many reasons as there are people who take the risk of being fully exposed outside of the private space of home whether that home is a house, an apartment, or even a single room where the door is closed – one’s sanctuary.

As a naturist who is also a member of a naturist club which has a gated property where I go camping, being nude outdoors is a given as long as the weather and temperatures don’t make that too difficult of a task – remember, I live in a northern country. There is no risk, and typically there are no photos taken either. Those images that are captured, in my case, have more to do with my daily journal than about anything else. They don’t become “public” images.

Putting images into the public realm is a completely different kettle of fish. When it comes to my motivation to post images of me, what is that about? It becomes a conversation between my mind and my body, a conversation that stretches me in a holistic manner. With each image, I see not just the physical me, but a hidden, perhaps unconscious, part of me is revealed. I become less of a stranger to myself.

Without this plunging into the depths of the unconscious to self-discover, it would be nothing more than exhibitionism and voyeurism. Of course, both are are present regardless. Humans are curious beings. They want to be seen and validated through being acknowledged as present. But of course, there is much more to it. I now leave it to you, the reader, to add your thoughts, your understandings, your motivations, or your reservations about 

It all seems so simple, but that idea of self-trust isn’t so common in our modern world. We are told to trust our economists, our politicians, our bosses and co-workers, our clergy – well just about anybody and everybody but ourselves. It makes you wonder just how that came about.

I did some digging and came up with a short article in Psychology Today, by Rick Hensen called, Trust Yourself. Rick concludes his article with:

Be your whole self; it’s your whole self that you can trust. This day, this week, this life—see what happens when you bet on yourself, when you back your own play. See what happens when you let yourself fall backward into your own arms, trusting that they will catch you.

Somehow, we end up trusting the roles people play, the idea of them as more knowledgeable than we are. After all, the collective we live in has given authority to these leaders of state, church, and so on. However, when it comes to individuals, we aren’t very trustworthy at all. Why? Because we don’t trust ourselves.

We don’t trust ourselves because we know the darkness that lurks beneath the surface. We know that we aren’t trustworthy because we lie to ourselves and others. We would trust ourselves if only we were saints. Growing up we were taught to distrust ourselves because we were flawed, owners and holders of original sin. We heard the inner voices that confirmed our flawed self. It’s a catch twenty-two situation.

Naturism, for me, has provided a crack in that way of thinking. Risking being clothing free allowed my body a chance to speak for itself. When confronted with the fact of one’s body, the reality of it; one has no choice but to be honest. When seeing others similarly nude, one becomes gentler with oneself. This body is me! For good or bad, this body is me. We become attuned to our bodies. We begin to care for our bodies in spite of any fashion magazine tries to assert the disastrous idea that we shouldn’t trust our bodies unless they conform to a certain standard that somehow is constantly shifting.

Once we accept the truth of our bodies, another crack appears and we begin to listen to our inner self, begin to trust the inner self. It isn’t easy work. There are so many voices, including a few within our own selves that want to claim that authority, wanting us to trust them because we are not trustworthy.

As with most mornings, I sit with my wife on the love seat in our living room, slowly waking up with fresh-ground coffee in our mugs. This morning, my head was swirling with scenes that could become part of my latest naturist novel. But it wasn’t just the novel that vied for my attention.

Yesterday, I sent out a tweet that bemoaned the inundation of images that purported to be naturist images. Of course, I am used to this phenomenon of men posting images of beautiful, trim and slim young women in all sorts of poses. Maybe the women were naturists, but the intent of the men tweeting the images was not about naturism.

I received the latest copy of AANR’s magazine called, The Bulletin. I had left the magazine on the kitchen table and my wife reacted to the image on the back cover, another “beautiful young thing” in all her glory in an advertisement for a nude cruise. The magazine was advertising the nude cruise for whom? The advertisement was selling a product using sex appeal. Now, how many women would resist booking such a trip, especially women of a certain age.

Of course, single men would buy a ride on the boat hoping that the promise of catching the attention of the “beautiful young thing.” But the problem is, very few single men belong to AANR, which is predominantly a club focused entity; and you typically can’t belong to a club when you are a single man. So, why did AANR accept the ad the way it was designed. I mean, the advertisement could have featured a man and/or a woman that didn’t look as if they were models.

Nude images are fraught with problems for the person captured in the image, and for the photographer, the worst of which appears to be how the images are used by others for an intent that has nothing to do with the photographer’s intent. It irks me to no end when images are turned into objects of fantasizing and then hashtagged as #naturism.

Sometimes there is a real need for darkness. Darkness is a place where we are the least sure of ourselves, and perhaps that is a good thing. Why do I say this? Well, more often than not, our ego gets in the way of our becoming wiser, more complete beings. In the darkness, we fall asleep and enter into a level of connection to something bigger than the boxes we put around the world and ourselves using our minds. In darkness, we give up control and the doors open to a universe beyond all of our imagining, a world within which we find ourselves at home – curious, isn’t it?

When we wake up to the light of a new day, when night is pushed away, we dismiss the dreams, the forebodings, the flying, the embracing of everything that is too absurd for our conscious mind to accept. We know better, or so we try to convince ourselves. And so, we arm ourselves to do daily battle with the outer world, encase ourselves in protective armour whether that be a business suit or other uniform that validates ourselves as “one of them.”

When we are asleep in the night, we are naked whether our bodies are clothed or covered with blankets and sheets. We find ourselves in scenes and scenarios where we are participants but not the author. We are unable to hide, even from ourselves. And exposed, we come to see the shadows that make us feel uncomfortable and uneasy. We come to realise that these shadows are other faces of ourselves, denied faces that rebel against being banished. In the night, while asleep, we are stripped of our ego, our conscious control.

What emerges is a rare kind of honesty which we dismiss when the light comes on moments after waking. In the light, we quickly put on our clothes to banish the lingering sense of vulnerability. But, we can’t cover up the gnawing sensation that we are still exposed, still vulnerable, and that life will discover our unease and unmask us as frauds. expose all of our warts, wrinkles, all the stains on our soul that lurk in the shadows waiting to erupt and embarrass us in the eyes of others in the world. No matter how many layers of clothing or makeup we put on, no matter whether there are designer labels or no-name brands of camouflage, we continue to feel naked, exposed, and vulnerable.