Through a Naturist Lens

The first of January, 2016. For the first time in a few years we actually were awake when the New Year arrived in our corner of the world. I continued the tradition of not making any resolutions. It’s enough that I am still here, still breathing, and still being present as much as I can with each moment that appears.

Yet, I do have desires, goals of sorts, that lay in front of me. And, I have expectations that are based on my habits and history. I expect that I will continue to write. I have two books in progress at the moment. I expect that I will continue to wake up nude each morning beside my nude wife and be satisfied if not even blessed. I expect that I will continue to take photos simply because. Of course all of this is based on the assumption of continued existence.

I know that death is a constant companion for all of us. I am not trying to be morbid, but simply to state a fact that should let us look at the moments in front of us as precious. Seize the day –carpe diem– for this may be your last day. Revel in each moment of relationship, in each sunrise and sunset, in the currents of air that touch you, and in your own being. The expression “today is the first day of the rest of your life” suggests that one doesn’t waste these precious days and hours, but perhaps we need to also have an older expression that comes from my indigenous roots – “today is a good day to die.” This isn’t to suggest that we embrace death, but that we meet each day honourably and authentically so that if and when death comes, we can leave this place having done the best we could.

It has been a long time since my last post. Most of my time has been spent with this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I had decided to rewrite the third volume of my autobiography. I have changed it from a first person rendition to the third person as was done with the first two volumes. Of course, that meant using the pseudonym Benjamin as was the case for those first two books. Now, it feels like the book belongs with the other two.

The bulk of that writing is done leaving me a heavy rewrite and editing task ahead of me for the winter ahead when we return to Puerto Morelos. The hardest part is yet to come. On another note, no poetry project is planned for Mexico.

Christmas decorations are up in the house, with a few set outside in front of our picture window, just as is done every year.

The time back since Spain has been almost anticlimactic. Other than writing, I have been finding myself stressed. Likely it has been due to the content of the book which has been stressful to write. Like the image above, I have resorted to coping strategies. Why I would go out into the countryside for such an image is beyond me. There was no chance that I would have been seen because of the location. I am craving sunshine and warmth.

As the week drew to an end, we made the decision to stay one more week. My wife’s foot was still to sore to enjoy being a tourist. Other than the trip to Estepona and across the street to either of the two decent grocery stores, all of my time has been spent nude at Costa Natura. My wife has had more nude time than I have had during the past ten days as I did the grocery shopping and the trip to Estepona alone in order to buy plane tickets to Paris.

We have walked the beach while nude a few times, read by the pool using our tablets, and watched as other couples played pétanque. We swam almost everyday, and used the hot tub at least two or three times a day. Near the end of our stay, we found out that one of our neighbours at Costa Natura was a relatively famous opera singer from Canada. He was often in the hot tub when we were there. Tomorrow, we go to Málaga where we will catch our plane to Paris, then on to go home to Canada.

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We have finished walking the Camino de Santiago del Compostela, an 800 kilometre trek across northern Spain. It took us forty-two days of hiking to complete it.

We are in Costa Natura, in the south of Spain near Málaga. It’s a naturist condo community more than a resort. We decided not to walk the final stage past Santiago to reach Finisterre as my wife’s foot was hurting bad. And to admit it, my foot was hurting as well. We booked a condo at the resort for a week There was a hope that we would be better and be able to still do some more sightseeing in other parts of Spain before we would board our planned flight home to Canada.

I was surprised when she agreed to spend a week here. There is no question that this is a luxury upgrade from Green Haven. The condo is bright and surrounded by flowering plant life. She wasted no time in shedding her clothes and taking advantage of the large hot tub near the swimming pool. Heat is healing. just ask any sports physiotherapist.

The photo above was taken using my tablet which has a very poor camera when light conditions are not almost perfect. I did manage to get other, better, photos, such as this one of her in the pool with the hot tub building in the background.

As in the past, no one would have ever guessed that she wasn’t a nudist/naturist considering the ease at which she exhibited as she walked clothing free in the public spaces. Something tells me that this is going to be a treasured memory.

It has been weeks since my last post here at Naturist Lens. We have spent so much of the time since then with visits and activities with our children and grandchildren. We are now home and my wife is back at work at the nursing home.

Today, our neighbour from two doors down wanted my help with her desktop computer that was upstairs in her house. As always, I said I would be there in a short while to take care of the problem. I have been their free IT person for years, so this was nothing new. Since I was leaving home, I put on a pair of shorts to walk to her and her husband’s place. She led the way to the computer room while explaining the problems she was having. Once up the stairs and going to the computer, she held out a towel for me to put on the chair. I always use a towel when I sit while nude. At that point, I still had on my shorts as I had no thought of doing otherwise.

Knowing that I always worked nude on the computer when I was at home, she encouraged me to get comfortable while I worked at trying to solve the problem, the issue was with the connection to the printer. This caught me totally by surprise. It was one thing for her to see me nude in my home or within my yard, but this was her home. Was it about respect for my being a naturist, or was it something else?

I risked taking her up on her offer since she had seen me nude multiple times. She watched closely while I worked to see what I did in hopes she could do the same in the future and she kept up a constant chatter. When the problem was fixed, she delayed by asking a few extra questions about her lost images which I then found for her. Then, she asked me to have tea with her down in her living room. She carried the towel down the stairs and put it on the sofa for me to sit on while she made tea. It felt very strange to be nude in her home.

It has been a good day though it did get off to a dreary start. I delayed meditation until almost 11 am when the sun finally came out. I chose to stay at home and enjoy the day and write more of the story-in-progress rather than drive two hours to visit our naturist friends near Battleford who host social nudist events on their acreage called Pair-a-Dice Acres.

In the afternoon, while I was writing, our immediate neighbour to the west saw me while I was nude on our back deck. She walked into our yard and said “Hi” before returning to her own yard. She is the neighbour who has the large raspberry patch I had picked in yesterday. I had assumed that she had retreated because she saw me nude and was uncomfortable with my nudity. However, she soon came back into our yard and asked if she could have some of our beets from the garden for some meal that she was preparing. I was still nude as I hadn’t expected her to return. She then passed near me while I sat near the little table. I didn’t get up at go into the house as I didn’t want to be seen as flaunting my nudity by standing up.

After time spent in our garden picking beets, she stopped at the edge of the deck to make sure that I let my wife know that she had thinned out the beets.

The lawns are done. I did all the back lawn, as well as the trimming in the nude. Next I picked raspberries before heading to the store. I picked raspberries at our neighbour’s after a trip to the grocery store. To be honest, I wasn’t nude the whole time I picked raspberries. I wore shorts most of the time and only took them off long enough to get a few raspberry picking photos such as this photo. I put the camera back into the house then finished that chore while wearing the shorts. There is no fence around my neighbour’s yard. I would have been visible to people living in at least three different houses, not including ours. As well, any passing vehicle going down the back lane would have caught me au naturel.

Not long after, our neighbour from two doors down came over while I was writing at the little table on the deck. I have written often of her surprise visits while my wife is at work and I am at home alone. Of course, as usual I was writing without wearing any clothing. She wanted me to help with finding out bus information from Cancun to Merida in Mexico, as well as with her Gmail account. She had also brought over her laptop for me so that I could rescue some of her photos. As she said nothing about my nudity, it was a while before I bothered to put on a pair of shorts. My nudity is apparently a non-issue as she has seen me naked many times. I finished off the afternoon BBQing some smokies for our supper while nude on the deck.

This afternoon, I decided to mow the lawn, fully in the nude for the whole back yard and clothed for the front yard. Then, I began to take off a few fence boards in our backyard, also in the nude, so that I could begin work on straightening the fence that our immediate neighbour to the west knocked askew when she backed into it with a truck sometime last year.

I won’t be able to do all the fence work while nude, but it is more than I would have ever predicted in the past. Why? Why has it changed? Well to be honest, the only thing that has changed has been me.

The town has so few people in it during July that it isn’t really that much of a risk.

That said, I did push the envelope just a bit more than was sensible without suffering repercussions for being nude in public – I was on the neighbour’s side of our fence by the back alley for this last photo. Fence is now fixed and all is well. Obviously, no one saw me as I wasn’t reported nor has there been any vile gossip about that naked man in the back lane. Yet, I can’t be certain.

I chose this photo today, a scene from our time spent at Green Haven. The image was taken before another permanent resident of the naturist site came over to have a cup of coffee with my wife and I. He is definitely one of the walking wounded who make the place home. I didn’t get a photo with him as I don’t care to break community rules regarding photography.

My mother was often suffering headaches, was often pregnant, and had her hands full with too many children. As her eldest child, I was the one who would step in by request, and by choice, to do what I could. I was one who had adapted to life’s early experiences by becoming a person who did what he could to please those around him. Nothing has changed over the course of my life, I still aim to please. Now, there is some consciousness involved in the behaviour of trying to please – yet there is a significant amount of unconscious processes involved as well.

No one makes it through childhood without being wounded in some fashion. I have talked before about being wounded by “not-enough-ness” and/or “too-much-ness.” Too much love or not enough love; too much of mothering or not enough mothering; every metric that you can think of can result in either too much or not enough. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we grow up with too much or not enough of everything – sometimes there is just enough. When there is too much or not enough, we develop unconscious and sometimes conscious strategies to buffer and mediate, and in some extreme cases, even survive.

As mature adults, we have learned to build walls to protect ourselves, walls that don’t come down simply because we become naked. Nakedness is a discarding of clothing. It is not a true disclosure of who we are beneath our skin. Discarding our clothing implies that we have nothing left to hide and thus not vulnerable anymore to unwanted exposure. Yet, nakedness is just another disguise that can protect that vulnerable wounded inner child within each of us.

As my last post indicated, we had been camping at Green Haven Sun Club. What it didn’t mention was that I had left home to go there while in a depressive state. I needed to have healing time, something that comes to me largely through sunshine, quietness, and nudity. I guess the best way to describe it is a mixture of alchemy and air. The sun acts like a cooking flame to reduce the rigidity of the psyche, to make it more malleable. The air acts as a coolant to help temper the psyche, ensuring that the “self” is strong enough to handle stressors. Regardless of the psychological mechanics, going skyclad works and I slip out of depression back into being a more positive and energized man. I know that doesn’t work for everyone, so I don’t exactly recommend it for therapy – at least not overtly.

At the campgrounds, I got to see quite a few people, and with my background in depth psychology, I think I have a bit of insight into the general mental states of those I meet. There are a few couples, older than us, who seem to be generally happy with their lives. typically it is the male partner who is most comfortable with being nude. Their female partners are comfortable, but a bit discrete in their nudity – reclining with legs open like their husbands is not a preferred position. There is no hiding, but there also isn’t a sense that they are fully comfortable.

There are a fair number of recombined relationships among the rest of the couples, people on their second or third marriages. The men are somehow quieter than the women, less overt. Alcohol plays a larger role and with it I sense a large cover-up that tries to deny any insecurity, a bravado that says. “we’ve got our shit together and could care less about who sees what!”

A few of European backgrounds move and present themselves with confidence as though being nude is not a factor to be thought of or overcome in the sense of identity. A family from England with their two daughters, a farmer and his wife from Belgium who have made their homes in Canada for more than forty years are a couple of examples.

Then there are the single people who span from the age of seventy-five to early thirties including men and women. There is a sense of broken edges with them which might stem from issues of past relationships to issues of physical health.

Regardless of all of this, there is an openness and a willingness to come together into a community with rare exceptions. As in every community, there are the outliers who are present but dissociated, people who do their own thing with little regard for the presence of others. The women are prone to use a wrap when in doubt. The men are less anxious, but are often seen with a housecoat or some sort of safety blanket near at hand.

From where I sit, I wonder what it was that brought them to a nudist campground in conservative country where nudity is almost a greater sin than any other law or moral code. What was broken in them that had them forsake the belief system of their families of origin? Conversations with almost all reveal that their nudity is kept secret or very silent from others in their lives. Life in the campground is definitely an alter-life, even for those who live there year round.