Through a Naturist Lens

Sunshine and warmer temperatures have returned after a few days of wind, cloud and scattered rain showers. There is still wind to put up with, however that isn’t enough to make plans to follow our usual walk routine. We had coffee on the patio and decided to head out for an early beach walk before the weather turned cloudy and/or rainy as forecast. We got to stop at the clothing-optional beach for a quick au naturel swim for me on our way back.

Lunch is over and the weather has stayed pleasant. It is time to head back to the beach for sunbathing time. I was at the beach next to Desires by 2 pm and my wife arrived at 3 pm. I got a good amount of sun by then so we both went into the sea to swim, her topless and me fully nude.  

It was time to head back to the casa. Our neighbours from two doors down had arrived yesterday evening and tonight we are supposed to go out for supper with them.

New Year’s Day morning was good– coffee on the patio with me nude as usual. Meditation followed before we had breakfast on the patio. With the forecast not promising, we decided to try a morning walk along the beach, a walk that was cut short because the clouds began to gather and darken. We only made it as far as the clothing-optional beach in front of Desires where I got a worker there to take our photo. We hope to get out again later this afternoon if the weather improves as promised. 

Each morning I begin with a few exercises while still in bed, stretching exercises to help loosen up leg muscles for the most part. Then, I do a few floor exercises for more stretching and hopefully, abdominal tightening such as this pose taken when morning meditation was done. If I am determined enough, I should be in better shape from a visual as well as physical point of view. I don’t want to give in to age as I have too many plans for long-distance walking and for countries yet to visit. This photo was taken two days ago when I took advantage of being next to the clothing-optional beach.

My wife is just as vested in taking care of her body, though I wonder how her leg and foot will cope with the European Peace Walk in May and June. Until then, it is a determined workout that strengthens body and mind. It’s a very cloudy morning giving everything a sense of greyness that might mean rain and a delayed beach walk, if there is indeed a beach walk in the forecast for today. As I write this morning, I have to be extra careful in being invisible while naked as it is the maid’s day at Casa Sorpresas,

We are back in Puerto Morelos, Mexico. We arrived on the 6th of December. We quickly changed into bathing suits for our first beach walk under sunny and warm conditions moments after arriving at Casa Sorpresas. We walked nine kilometres and stopped at the Pearl Desires’ beach.

As usual, we stopped at Desire’s for our swim where I got to finally strip out of my bathing suit. I wonder about when she will decide to swim au naturel with me and the others who swim at that beach. Walking on, my wife pointed out likely locations for me to do nude sunbathing mentioning that she would likely join me for that activity from time to time.

Back at the house, the shower head fell off before our first shower. We showered with water pouring out the open pipe. We called our landlady who lives in the front part of the house for the shower head to be repaired.

Our landlady now has a live-in boyfriend. She informed us that she won’t be renting out the studio next year as she will be turning it into an office. We are feeling quite discouraged by the situation here, a change that leaves me much less time for naturism in the garden.

We have registered to walk the European Peace Walk for the end of May and most of the first three weeks of June. There will be ten of us starting off from Sopron, Hungary and walking to reach Trieste, Italy. We will be walking as many long walks as we can while in Mexico.

For the past week I have been busy with the normal rhythms of life, of autumn on the Canadian prairies. With winter threatening as the geese gather to feed before their long pilgrimage to the southern climes of North America, I like many others, have been cleaning the last of our produce from the garden. The garden is now tilled and prepared for a long winter’s sleep.

Because of the need to focus on the prosaic tasks of autumn, gardens, and winterizing our camper, there has been no thoughts given to this blog site. There will more than enough time for that in the months that will follow.

I have been lucky in that the weather has warmed up just in time for the work to be done. We only had one rain day which was appreciated as it softened the hard clay that passes as our garden soil. For the past two days I have tilled the garden and added more than 200 litres of peat moss before tilling it a second time. I am pleased with the result though I have the beginnings of blisters on my hands in spite of wearing work gloves while manhandling the garden tiller. There is a sense of satisfaction in manual tasks done well.

While I was working in the garden totally nude, my neighbour from two doors down walked past our yard, down the back lane, and let me know that she would stop by for tea when she finished her walk. She returned while I was working, went into our house and warmed up tea in the microwave while I continued to turn the garden with the shovel. When the tea was ready, I joined her on the back deck for the tea break.

When the tea break was done, I got a couple of photos of the two of us to illustrate her accepting me as a naturist. I wonder just what she was thinking with inviting herself into my yard while My wife is at work. She does it more often than is comfortable for me. In truth, she is not my friend but her friend. I don’t want to be rude and jeopardize their friendship by challenging her. She is a notorious gossip. Oh well, it is what it is.

Now that most of the work has been completed, I am turning once again to writing. The second novel in the pilgrim series is just entering into the first rewrite.

It was foggy when we woke up this morning, a result of too much rain for too many weeks. This is typically dry prairie with about seven inches of rain up to this point in the year. So far we are somewhere around twenty inches of rain with some disastrous results for some crops that require less moisture and more heat. Weather is unpredictable, shifting between drought and flooding.

But this isn’t about the weather, but about how we often find ourselves in our own seasons of fog. It seems that after a period of clarity and awareness, we get visited by ghostly shadows which remind us that we are far from being fully aware of very much at all. All I have to do is judge how I respond to the retreat of sunshine behind clouds and then being embraced by the clammy-feeling fog. There is a sensation that there are things out there that surround me that I have absolutely no knowledge of, dark and damp things, stuff from the personal and collective unconscious.

We are back from our camping at Helios Naturist Campgrounds near Edmonton.

There is a heavy mist outside due to very high humidity. Wednesday was a day of rain from the time we woke until nightfall. We got 93 mm of rain which meant that we spent a lot of time vacuuming up water in the basement. The day also saw us preparing twelve large cabbages for sauerkraut. Needless to say we went to bed exhausted

A different photo to the left that almost hides my face yet doesn’t hide the fact that I was nude. I hesitated for quite a while before accepting the photo for use here. There are too many headless, naked man images flooding the Internet. I was excited about the return of the sun and taking care of the things in our yard that have been neglected.

I even cut the lawn though it wasn’t too long just in case of another rainstorm deciding to make an appearance. A low-level of standing water in the northeast corner of our garden made mowing more difficult than normal but I would have to wait for several more days with total sunshine before it had any chance of drying up. Of course, the lawn was mowed while I was skyclad.

Photos are an integral part of my journal. This is the fourth year in a row that I have kept a Skyclad Journal. It was only after, a few hours later, that the idea for bringing the photo here made its appearance into my consciousness. Of course, I asked myself “why?” and that becomes the raison d’etre of this blog post.

Photos are a reminder that I am my own authority. Though I don’t post genital images, it is valid if I should choose to do so in order to remind myself about who is really in charge here on my blog site. Being in charge doesn’t mean full-frontal images. It simply means that I have a choice. It’s not so easy to differentiate and it is important to make note of that fact consciously.

With that said, it’s time to return to the sunshine.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I will be 67 years old. Happy birthday to me. We are busy with preparing for a ten-day excursion away from home which will involve two weddings book-ending a four day stay at Helios Naturist Club near Edmonton, Alberta which is about six-hours drive towing our small camping trailer.  

Of course, one of the things that need taking care of is the mowing of our lawns, the neighbour’s seen in the house in the background, at least the part behind the white garage top left, and the chain link fence area along the back lane. I also mowed my next-door neighbour’s back yard as well. The only time I had to wear anything was when mowing our front lawn. The town is almost empty and there is no fear of being seen. And yes, you see right, our back fence is not what anyone would call a privacy fence.

But enough of the small talk. As I listen in on the conversation of other naturists from around the world via social median, I am seeing something that contradicts the words spoken. In spite of the collective belief that naturism is under attack by the society at large, the evidence points to something else, a quiet no-comment most of the time. Of course there are incidents of negative response to being seen nude. But so many times, that negative response doesn’t appear. Perhaps there is a deep, almost unconscious acceptance of the validity to live as one chooses as long as it doesn’t interfere in the lives of others in a significant manner. For the most part because of media, the naked body has become just another choice that isn’t much different from dressing in various fashions. The key is that the naked body is becoming less threatening.

It’s Sunday, and it is just another day at the beginning of summer with nothing extraordinary to set it apart from other days. Well, that is with the exception of having another day to mow our lawns. Of course I wear shorts when mowing the front lawn. The back lawn? Not at all. Today I added in the back lawn of one of my neighbours, a yard that is devoid of fences for the most part.

So why did I decide to mow her back lawn while au naturel? Taking risks? Well, not really as the town is basically empty as everyone has gone to take part in camping, trips to cottage country, a visit to a neighbouring town that is celebrating 100 years of existence, or simply hiding inside behind closed draperies for their own brand of privacy and attempts to stay cool as the temperature climbs.

This photo was one of a few I took in my neighbour’s yard. I was fully visible to passing traffic if there had of been any traffic in the back lane. No one saw me and that was as it should be. Now, there is likely a psychological study waiting to be done and then analyzed about why one takes such needless risks. I somehow get the feeling that it more about protest than it is about exhibitionism.

Why should I or anyone else have to hide when doing something so prosaic as mowing lawns? There is nothing sexual or threatening to the public good at stake. Yet, should anyone take offence, I would have a lot of explaining to do, and likely suffer in more ways that I would want. Perhaps it is time to dial back the protests and become a passive old man that smiles in the background.

Smiling feels good. Even when a person is depressed, the smallest smile adds light in what is felt like a deep and dark hole. One of the things I cherish about naturism is the element of joy that seems to appear much easier than when I am clothed. As I listen to others speak of their naturist experiences, joy seems to rank as one of the prime responses to being nude, especially if one is able to be nude in the presence of others who are also nude.

Being nude with others allows one to feel safer than being in the presence of others where one is the only one without clothing. At those times one is truly vulnerable and at risk. It wasn’t an accident that collectives have used nudity as part of punishment for some perceived crime against the collective. Removing the offender’s clothing in those instances is more about stripping them of dignity and protection. Then, with the message given, the sentence is then carried out leaving the offender to meet that sentence without a stitch of pride or peace that would allow the offender to endure the punishment with personal dignity.

I think of Jesus, stripped like a common criminal and made to carry a cross through jeering crowds, whipped like a brute animal along the route. Naked like other common criminals punished by the Romans, he was hung from a cross. It is only after the fact, centuries later, that we placed a loin cloth to somehow make the event more spiritual and less brutally human. Being fully self, non-judgmental with others, gives rise to joy from the heart.

However, being without clothing by choice with others who have made the same choice is empowering. There is a sense of real freedom rather than oppression. It is so easy to accept what one sees in others who trust us enough to drop their clothing and be fully present. With nothing to hide, to disguise when one risks being clothing free, one begins to accept the “self” with all its perceived imperfections. It is as though in accepting others as they really are, we break through a psychological barrier that allows us to be honest and accepting of ourselves. No wonder there is so much evident joy in social nudism. We have stopped being our own oppressors.

I got to spend four days in the Eagle Hills near Battleford with my trailer parked at the home acreage of the man who is in charge of the Prairie Suns Nudist Club. On Friday, he took me on a hike through the Eagle Hills to the west of the acreage. Once we were away from traffic, we were able to doff the clothing and hike nude while we discussed all sorts of topics that were dear to his heart, especially Christianity and nudity.

I set up camp on the acreage, while waiting for a naturist pot luck event set for Saturday afternoon. B. and his wife, N. were great hosts. Somehow in the middle of nowhere, they had a solar heated pool and a hot tub for the cool mornings and evenings as amenities. It was too warm, the wrong season for putting the sauna to work.

Since I had somehow forgot to pack the power supply for my laptop, I was forced to enjoy the sunshine without interruption for most of the days that passed. It was the first time I had been to the acreage for a nude gathering without my wife. So, I had to make do with calls home in the morning and late evening to fill her in with my adventures and to find out how her days and nights had passed.

The pot luck was attended by eight people, a much smaller group that last year. I contributed to the pot luck by making a potato dish in the slow cooker – potatoes, bacon, onion and cheese. It was a recipe that my wife had suggested that I make for the event since it cooked while I was hiking without my worrying whether or not it would be undercooked or burnt. I don’t have the best attention span and get easily distracted.

That served to have the topic of how to meet the changing demographics if the club was to survive. I suggested that instead of focusing on getting members for the club, that the group create open-invitation events which would be clothing-optional. Art and nature photography, body-painting, writing camps for those interested in poetry or short stories, drawing classes for the human nude, and music camps for those interested in sharing their musical talents and perhaps picking up a few ideas from other musicians. Advertising events could take many forms and would hopefully create a larger network of prairie people who would come to share an interest in social naturism.