Excerpt: Introduction Excerpt: Body Freedom Excerpt: Vegan Diet Excerpt: Hippie Counterculture |
 Excerpts: Body Freedom Body Freedom: Pursuit of body acceptance, body comfort, and being at ease socially naked. Often part of a more natural lifestyle than conventional society follows or allows. ................  The next day, we were both looking spiffy in nothing, off on another nature stroll, wending our way along one of the parallel-stick-defined trails I'd etched thru the adjoining national forest as a low-key amusement ride for meditative hikers. We'd been talking about body awareness."You grow up nudist and you have a whole different attitude towards clothes," she said. We were passing a bleached cow skull I'd found hiking cross-country and placed beside the trail as a curiosity. She saw it and laughed, diverted. "I'd only put clothes on when I felt like it - except when we went on the road, of course, and then my parents explained how things were beyond our gates, how most people were uncomfortable with their bare bodies and in seeing others'." She became so intent on her subject she walked right by another item I'd found in the forest: a coffee mug, ceramic handle gone, reading: "Mutants for Nuclear Power." It sported a Cyclops happy face. "How could people reject their own bodies?" she asked. "It's a bafflement." "It struck me as totally weird. I mean, how weird is that? When I was small, I naturally assumed the whole world was clothing-optional. I'll always remember the day I was disabused of that notion. "I was in town one day with my parents. Even tho I must have been wearing something myself, I remember thinking how odd it was how all the people around us looked like they were wrapped up like cocoons. Who are all these cocoon people, I thought. What was that all about? It took me years to understand. It saddened me to realize nudists were only a tiny minority in a body-phobic world, publicly wed to dress. "But, strange to say, I rarely felt `imprisoned' in clothes - as you put it - when I got older. Only when we were away from home too long in the textile world and I longed to pull off my clothes on a hot day but couldn't, and so started overheating - then I felt trapped. My parents always tried to get us the thinnest, most breathable cloth for such excursions to minimize discomfort." "Lucky you, growing up with such thoughtful parents," I said. "My dad was the Cocoon Master. ... |
© Stuart R. Ward. All Rights Reserved.