Vegetarian my whole adult life, I went vegan -- for ethical and health reasons alike -- in 2006, during research of the novel Strange Days Indeed. As is the wont of more bohemian spirits, I pursue clothes-free living whenever weather, whim and circumstance allow around my northwest rural home front. Getting mindfully naked in nature has got to be one of the easiest, cheapest forms of feel-good therapy around. During seven years I worked at a local rural mineral springs resort, I rallied to change its repressive cover-up policy, one reflecting society's entrenched compulsory/compulsive dress mindset born of a sleeping world only now waking up.

I've called the same secluded two-acre, off-grid patch of high desert woodlands home for the last 31 years.

Your inveterate dreamer-artist type, I'm sometimes given over to rarefied states of mind. I sometimes imagine the way things could be so vividly, it feels real, a done deal. It was at our Stewart Mineral Springs one day after more body-friendly ways took hold that I concluded everyone was a nudist at heart. All that was needed to embrace one's inner nudist was a peaceful environment, positive example, a liberating dose of body acceptance and, critically, permission.

Stuff for a novel, I thought excitedly. Why not spin a yarn about the whole bloomin' world going starkers? Mindfully, of course.

The novella that emerged, Body Freedom Day, was, simply, a naked tale. It was well received in limited naturist(i.e. nudist) circles. But I wasn't done. A larger story was clamoring to emerge. Over the next two years the tale unfolded that included the advent of universal compassionate diet and growing embrace of green awareness as well as growth of radical body freedom. Humanity's consciousness is rising every day and connecting more dots and I hoped to capture that in a way. The work coalesced as my subject understanding, elusive self-knowledge and writing discipline grew along with this fast-unfolding collective consciousness. An awareness reflected in dramatic recent events like the man inspired to walk the entire length of England naked. The old narrator, Zet Quimby, living in a future time of universal animal-free diet and total body freedom, wants to trace their history, changes afoot in our time, and how animal diet and body suppression affected his younger life.

Result: a crazy-quilt blend of visionary fantasy, quasi-autobiography, alternative-culture history, current event snapshots, and unabashed polemic for body freedom and cruelty-free diet and returning to nature. It's a work aimed towards anyone who questions the validity of conventional diet and/or dress customs, anyone working towards greater holistic awareness, anyone open to tales with positive alternative-reality themes. ...and veterans of the late 60s'/early '70s purple haze days.

Tying vegan diet to body freedom for interwoven story theme might seem unlikely at first. A bit of reflection, though, reveals their deep interconnection. Consider the following, admittedly improbable, scenario: A nudist resort situated next to a slaughterhouse. Even the most gung-ho, meat-loving nudist would be hard pressed to enjoy his hamburger in peace in his pool lounger while bearing the stench of death and plaintive cries of sentient beings being slaughtered right next door constantly reminding him of the violent origin of his all-American triple-A ground-round meal.

So long as the dispatching of animals' lives takes place far away, though, out of sight and earshot and scent, it's easy to dully keep in the mass denial society in its ignorance has fostered, to disassociate one's meal from the horrific reality of the wholesale slaughter of fellow sentient beings` -- an age-old practice we've been falsely taught to accept as normal and necessary for good health.

Like more and more, I discovered freeing one's inner body of the vestments of such cruel diet in addition to the oppressive outer shackles of needless clothing allows greater peace of mind in which to more richly enjoy being nude -- knowing that by choosing what one puts on the plate each day in some measure helps make the world a less miserable, more life-form-friendly place to live.

So these are the themes. O.K. Both are personal and often controversial. Telling a bit more about where I'm coming from is perhaps in order. It's done at the risk of telling more about myself than most would ever want to know or I'd really like to reveal. So be it. A writer is only as relevant as he is willing to share his innermost self with readers, to serve as reflection or contrast to their own. To fashion into words those amorphous, unspoken, perhaps unexamined, thoughts and feelings common to others. And I've already used some of my relevant life experiences in writing -- albeit semi-fictionalized -- as fodder to create an Everyman character wrestling with these two oppressive customs, so it's not like this is any new revelation.

It's said one's worldview jells about the age of 17. A native San Franciscan born in late 1949, I hit that marker in 1967 a half-hour's walk from the Haight-Ashbury during its full-tilt, mystical blossoming best. Being super impressionable and naturally nonconformist -- inwardly at least -- and having grown up perhaps a tad more dysfunctional than most, I drank in the colorful down-to-earth counterculture like one dying of thirst. Though too hung up to ever blossom into one of your classic forthright peace-and-love hippies, I resonated fully with their rock-solid ethos of trying to live consciously and peaceably and closer to nature.

Inspired, I quit eating animal flesh and spent more and more time exploring wilderness. Seven rough but informative, wanderlusting years of hitchhiking and rail-riding later, I came into some money and snagged a couple acres of land in the juniper and sage foothills of the Mount Shasta region at the top of California.

I'd recently qualified for a federal entitlement program - S.S.I. - for being too loopy to fit into the conventional work force. Rather than dismiss myself as hopelessly nuts and a dead-weight burden on humanity, I saw myself as differently-abled, not dis-abled, marching to a different drummer. Okay, a way different drummer. One could argue all artist-types are a bit unmoored from conventional realities. They prefer dwelling within their rich creative inner worlds, detached from prosaic workaday world realities to dedicate themselves to following their muse and, hopefully as a by-product, enrich the world with the results and thereby redeem themselves as productive members of society after all.

Anyway, whether wannabe dedicated musician-writer artist or just plain nuts... In the relatively zero-stress solitude of my new rural environs my sensibilities needed to function without losing it, I began to thrive. Over time I hand-built a snug, solar-powered cabin, to code no less. After growing up in a twenty-room, definitely haunted Victorian that swallowed me whole, I welcomed learning to get by in a small custom-made space nestled in nature's serenity. In time I'd come more to terms with myself and make myself more practically useful to society, establishing a cottage industry wholesaling Indian smudge sticks and, later, harvesting and marketing local whole pumice stones for natural foot care. (If curious, check my website at www.wardpumice.com)

We discover that the stressed state of mind we learn all our lives to accept as normal melt away magically in nature over time, as we let go of old mindsets no longer serving living in tranquil solitude. We come to feel more at peace with the real selves smothered beneath corrosive social conditioning and/or various and sundry early-life traumatic episodes.

We go native, even.

Suddenly free to lose my clothes whenever I felt like it in warm weather without one blessed soul saying boo, I luxuriated in the simple euphoric joy of spending extended time naked in sun-splashed nature -- sometimes for days solid. I was able to hike and even drive unfrequented back roads nekked. Being free of clothes did wonders in helping rid me of that conformist social conditioning I'd been slave to. It made me feel better about myself, get more in tune with long-buried feelings. Plus it saved on laundry. Over time I'd cultivate an exquisitely rich renewed sensory awareness and continue turning around a faulty, guilt-drenched body mindset.

I frequented other West Coast mineral springs resorts allowing similar mindful public nakedness: Harbin, Orr, Jackson, Sierraville... There I worked at pealing away deeper layers of body shame and attendant sexual hang ups. Within the grand crucible of socialized nudity's mutual mirroring of our essential physical beings, all sorts of convoluted feelings -- from vulnerability, false modesty and objectification of self and others, to the delightful sense of freedom and insatiable curiosity about seeing humanity in their essential form -- are brought to the fore and dealt with.

The joy and freedom of getting free of clothes among kindred spirits in the sweet balm of nature was heady stuff. I experienced ongoing breakthroughs, learning to feel at home in my skin among others doing the same, all of us working to break that drop-forged iron link between nudity and sex locked in the mind since toddlerhood. I got in touch with formerly inaccessible feelings. As I reached a certain critical point in body acceptance, my chimerical imagination triggered the theme of public nudity for a part historic, part quasi-autobiographical, part surreal "what if" novel.

That day I found myself visualizing how, in a far gentler world, clothes-wearing might be optional everywhere. Consider: over the years working at the springs, I'd witnessed droves of people -- all ages, backgrounds, and degrees of fitness -- tickled to have discovered a place where, for the first time ever, for some, it was all right to be naked in public. Everyone really was a nudist at heart, I concluded. But life lived as a masquerade with costumes compulsory shut down or severely distorted that simple innocence of being unadorned and forgoing covering up with sense-inhibiting clothing when weather or warm space permit.

Wow, subject for a novel indeed, I thought, the day so nice it felt criminal to wear anything, and so nobody was.

The evolution of the novel to encompass peaceful diet was a natural one, given my veggie lifestyle. For a while, I enjoyed attending annual gatherings at naturist resorts, cultivating body acceptance amid others. Then, while researching, I discovered modern-day nudism was originally linked, part and parcel, to animal-free diet, among other things, and really getting back to nature. I soon came to see modern naturism as, alas, yet another reductionist "-ism", a hobbyist pastime largely out of synch with the holistic inter-connective awareness our planet is fitfully evolving towards. (One currently incubating in select safe-haven geographic pockets, as it were, as transcendent awareness strengthens and moves towards a massive tipping point.)

Something dawned on me after two years of intense focus analyzing and writing about nudity from dozens of angles. It's said if one dwells on any given subject long enough, you go beyond reductionist thinking and see its inter-connection to everything else. I now saw that humanity's collective level of body acceptance and body freedom were inextricably connected to the state of the planet's livability, of its life-form-friendliness. No one wants to be naked in unpeaceful, nature-starved environs; instead, they understandably wrap up in their textile armor more tightly, wanting to protect vulnerable biologic selves from negative forces both physical and social.

Radical body acceptance, I concluded, had to be integrated into an aware lifestyle -- including peaceful, non-violent diet and environmental sensitivity -- in order for optimal relevance. In the process of cobbling the novel together, I re-examined myself and my lifestyle on a deeper level and one day shed all animal by-products from my diet as easily as clothes by an inviting cool creek on a hot summer day.

Admittedly, writing about nudity easily lends itself to humor and lighthearted spins and the systematic slaughter of sentient beings doesn't. The book's tone sometimes shifts between lighthearted and dead serious in addressing each, though I also found the serious side of mandatory dress and body alienation and the lighter side of animal diet, at least in a black humor vein.

I read somewhere the writer risks losing the average reader if introducing more than five percent radical "new" ideas into the mix of a novel; the work runs the risk of coming off too woo-woo, too out there, for mainstream acceptance otherwise. Not knowing any better, my novel probably approaches more like five times that. So I suspect it might only appeal to a small, select reading audience.

That said, even if one isn't a veggie or freebody enthusiast, anybody no longer buying into the wonky mainstream mindset that's passed for reality for, lo, these many long millenia, will find fodder here and perhaps more than a bit of amusing diversion. Our whimsical aged protagonist Zet looks back on our current and near-future old world from the peaceful future like a remembered bitter-sweet dream. The reader might come away with a sense that the habits mankind has always accepted as normal might later come to be viewed as most peculiar indeed.



A last note, about the phenomenon of writing. Writing is grand therapy for the writer, reflecting his or her fresh revelations, varied topic fascinations, documentations of both personal and cultural events, and ongrowing spiritual growth. But, all to often,(or at least in my case) there's a gap between where the writer's actually at and where sometimes lofty words might lead you to think he's at. I'm no super-liberated champion of body freedom and compassionate diet, by any means. I mean, yes, I am a strict vegan and go freebody whenever I can, and will argue the merits of both if they come up in conversation. But I don't go on the lecture circuit to further the causes, like some, matching word to action. I'm still rife with hang-ups. My old lower self is still working to surrender to an emerging higher self. The more I confronted demons and worked out hang-ups in writing, the more I got into positive, meditative head spaces, flows in which I transcended my everyday self, at least for a while. And likely made a bit of net positive change in my life outlook. As other writers have noted, reading back on old writings, it's not uncommon to go, "Wow, I wrote that? Really?" It reminds me any inspired writing is a matter of dropping ego and letting spirit work through you; it makes me want to learn to keep in that transcendent space all the time. But what's a heaven for?

Thanks for reading. Buy a copy and I guarantee you'll make my day.



Thanks for reading.

Peace on Earth,

Stuart