The idea of "getting back to
nature" as a Good Thing is relatively recent in
Western thought. It had its origins in the Romantic movement and developed
during the middle years of the 1800s. At the beginning of that period, "nature"
had rather unfavorable connotations, being the force that civilization was
trying to overcome and rise above. But by the latter part of the century, the
idea had been rehabilitated and given the positive associations by people like
Walt Whitman and John Muir, which it retains to this day.
Some people, of course,
feel that nature is overly sentimentalized, that the state of nature in which
the Noble Savage once lived in harmony with himself and his environment is just
a myth engendered in the minds of relatively affluent people by the frustrations
of our urban civilization, that it is not now and never was quite so good as it
is made out to be.
Perhaps. It may be a myth.
But none of us live without our myths. Like art, myth is one of the ways we
explain us to ourselves. There is beauty, and truth, as well as pathos in our
myths.
Why be naked in nature? It
is, after all, not always convenient or comfortable. Sometimes the air is too
cold, the sun too hot, the brambles too unforgiving of bare skin, the insects
too thirsty for our blood.
But still... our skin is
our largest sense organ. Wearing clothes when we don't need them is like wearing
a blindfold over our eyes or earplugs in our ears. We miss so much - the warmth
of sunlight, the coolness of fog or a waterfall's mist, the caress of the
breezes, mud between our toes, a summer rain runneling down our flanks.
Everything has a price;
life is full of trade-offs. Like a street vendor in a middle-eastern bazaar,
nature is always offering us incredible bargains. If we don't want his fine,
hand-made pottery today, perhaps some rare, imported silks... Because he knows
we are uniquely able to appreciate the quality of his wares, he will let us have
our choice for an outrageously low price.
What will we choose, if
the only price nature asks today is to give up our clothes for a few hours or a
day? A taste of freedom? An ample bouquet of new sensations? A feeling of
connectedness and belongingness to the natural world?
Yes, and what if we could
afford at times to splurge, to be without our clothes for whole days all
together, even at the price of occasional discomfort? What then?
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