Nudist-Vegan Memoir Reveals
Bygone Era - OURS! - to
Enlightened New Generations
Imagine a world at peace. Harmony and respect for all living things. All-natural diet. And... the freedom to go naked!
The visionary-fantasy novel Strange Days Indeed paints such a picture - with a twist.
Our memoir writer, 112-year-old Zet Quimby, is reminiscing about present times - times he lived through - from an enlightened 2061 future viewpoint. One universally embracing body freedom and whole food, plant-based diet.
As he tells puzzled generations curious about the odd way we lived (present tense to us) and why, he casts a laser beam on the unlikely history of two age-old, now archaic, customs: compulsory-compulsive dress and cruelty-based diet.
Who hasn't imagined how nice it'd be if we didn't always have to wear clothes? Or deemed it barbaric the way millions of feeling animals are destroyed every day to become a dubious food source at best?
"In our heart of hearts, we were all natural-born nudists."
So writes Zet in his memoir, teleported back in time to us. After 2012, dramatic earth changes and quantum leap to unity consciousness have transformed life on Earth. In telling how improbably we lived, Zet recounts his own life as affected by our perma-dressed ways and destructive eating habits.
Not surprisingly, future generations view our old world as most peculiar.
"..an enlightening story that creatively promotes a more aware and compassionate way of living."
-Will Tuttle, Ph.D, author of The World Peace Diet - Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Stuart R. Ward's novel, while scoping the history of society's dress and diet habits plus current trends and future transformations, also explores holistic lifestyles, embracing nature on all levels, and the unlikely paths one takes trying to find oneself.
Equal parts nudist novel, veggie story, pop history, visionary fantasy,and quasi autobiography, the work breaks away from nonfictional book treatments of the main subjects. Subjects rarely dealt with together in any guise. Though, as the narrator reveals, natural diet and radical body freedom are both integral to living in optimal harmony with nature - which is, after all, what the green movement is all about.
"Advocates of body freedom and natural diet must have felt at times they were stranded on some strange flesh-eating, textile-obsessed planet."
- Zet, in book
Mulling over present times, Zet offers a bushel of reasons why we kept dutifully wrapped in cloth even in nice weather, though it crimped our comfort, drained our pocketbook and invalidated the integrity of our being. And delves into what drove us to routinely rob, kill, and devour fellow sentient beings, in the process generating needless suffering, destroying health, degrading the planet's ecosystem, and - critically - stifling humanity's innate spiritual awareness of - and all-inclusive compassion for - life's interconnectivity.
He relates how he grew up near San Francisco's blossoming 1960s Haight-Ashbury counterculture. Swept into the merry contagion of a massive, no-boundaries departure from life as we'd known it, he realizes he'd never fit into conventional society.
Zet flees the city to live in the woods. There he revels in the glad tidings of nature, shedding conventional conditioning along with clothes and radically changing diet. Once Nuela, a writer raised nudist, enters his life at a national rainbow gathering, they team up and explore alternative lifestyles together.
Now, in 2062 and living in a whole new world, he tries making sense of things for himself and posterity, Zet explores the myriad contributing factors to our former strange habits and boils them down to one main cause: humanity's profound disconnect from nature.
He muses over how we first got separated from nature, getting to where the notion of not concealing one's body in public was deemed immodest, anti-social,even perverse. To where the idea of not devouring slain sentient beings and robbing mothers of nursing fluids for their young was thought unhealthy - subversive, even. And he traces encouraging present trends rejecting such compassion disconnect thinking
All the while he ties the memoir to his own fitful quest for liberation. Using his own unlikely life experiences as ready example for how truly odd our times were, he shows how prevailing conditions all too easily slowed the unfolding of our innately noble, peace-loving selves.
"...Quimby's take on his own experience of the times...is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny ...Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing... The book is much more than a polemic for the naturist movement." - Sibyl Walski, Mount Shasta Herald [CA]
The book uses a futuristic sci-fi story framework to gain fresh perspective and allow for visionary "what-if" thinking. Strange Days is a sometimes serious, sometimes pixilated tale about people dealing with body acceptance and body freedom, of discovering peaceful, nutritious diet, green living, and journeys to realms of higher awareness. Realms for a while longer below the radar of mainstream consciousness.
"We felt the need to devour part of an animal carcass before thinking we'd had a real meal." - Zet, from novel
Even as Zet shares his experiences and those of many quirky relatives, the memoir brims with real names in the news, dates, quotes, and figures, supplying capsule histories of nudism and veggie diet and environmental awareness. Included: Germany's early 1900's nature-cure movement - little known but profoundly influential proto-hippie phenomenon - and the later hippie-rainbow counterculture, directly linked to it through time.
"...Ward takes us on a cultural journey, some of it rooted in the past and some, imagined, projected into the future. And what a future, indeed."
- VegNews
Zet remembers watershed body freedom events: Spencer Tunick's worldwide nude-group photo shoots, Nevada's annual Burning Man, Berkeley's "Naked Guy", England's "Naked Rambler", the pro-peace Baring Witness movement. Also: various clothing-optional mineral springs, World Naked Bike Day, Britain's Naked Rambler, national rainbow-hippie gatherings, and nude holiday cruises - one of which he goes on with Nuela.
Also included in passing are the birth of the veggie and vegan movements, 60s' natural-food renaissance, speculations on how man first came to devour fellow sentient lifeforms, and current interest in plant-based, whole-food diets. He delves into how wonky war-is-peace powers dismissed and twisted mountains of evidence linking animal diets to the onset of almost every degenerative disease under the sun.
In his most detailed remembrance, Zet recounts how he and old high school friends joined in an historic 2011 Bay-to-Breakers footrace in San Francisco. (Still our future when book was teleported.) Thousands of springtime celebrants jogged and strolled across town naked one magical spring day, triumphantly reclaiming long-denied body freedom. Back home, he and Nuela write a fantasy about the run triggering a global body-liberation phenomenon.
Lastly, our narrator tells how catastrophic natural disasters, fused with the quantum shift in spiritual awareness, lead to planetary peace - fulfilling mankind's age old desire to live in harmony...
...and the freedom to go naked!
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~ Site updated December 31, 2011 ~
