The clouds are moving fast, through a turquoise palette this pleasant morning. I am watching a large white dragon fly across the sky. I pull out a camera, but my effort is not quick enough. By the time I’m ready, it has become a simple fat horny toad and then disappears.
We had been awakened early to the sound of the neighbor’s generator and a pounding hammer, before the first light of day. I barely slept by pulling covers over my head and ears. When I next poked my head out, I was surprised and pleased to find those neighbors gone.
Last night, I commented on the smell of their pot, but it is still here. Apparently, it is the mountains. As I sniff around, the pine and wild plants place that aroma on the wind. It’s curiously everywhere.
With their disappearance, we are slightly more capable of casual nudity, but across the road, there is still a view of a trailer, as I sit at the provided cement picnic table.
We take off up the road walking to find the illusive trailhead. Up the road a piece, there is not an official trailhead, but a definite road off of this maintained one. It is a spur and a very rough one. It would require a 4×4, quad, or mountain bike, to traverse just the first 100 feet. This will be our hike today.
August is ending, as we are setting out. DF’s mother is turning over the 100 years mark in her life. There will be a grand gathering of the family in Georgia. We have decided to take the trip out on the road. It will be approximately a month long, across America and back.
Last year, we had an open ended trip that lasted nearly two months. This time we’ll be away somewhere about half that time with a more structured itinerary. We’ll need to arrive a few days before the gathering to help out, so we’ll be traveling with a deadline for the first crossing,
I have set up a series of new places to try. Every stop has a plan and an opportunity to explore with the addition of nudity. This way, there will be a little more excitement, a game to play, a game to win, by doing this trip nude. The game prize will be a liberation in the face of a silly tyranny, freedom out on the road.
I’ve found life to be better when seasoning is added. It can be imagination, something that may be called flare, or a changeup. A pile of rock and dirt can become majestic, or a barren expanse may be wide open spaces in my soaring heart. Things can go so far as to bringing in a sense of more closeness to infinity and awe, or of God. The herb in this slice of life will be bare bodies.
When I use all of my senses, I can breathe in magical air with fascinating scents. There is so much here in any moment when I open up to it. When more synapses go off in symphony, the vibrations are raised, my whole being is stimulated. I feel more and it becomes more.
I’m going to say it again, “Life is just better when done naked.” A kiss of air through the crack in a window, the draft when I shift my legs, the anticipation of a full experience, adds to the moment by moment experience of the day. Just stopping the car and stepping out, can be an amazing new world and add a huge sense to life.
There is the simple addition of the full abandonment without clothing. There may be a hint of calculated risk, usually nil, but still a game is afoot.
Preparations have been fairly smooth as we have camped and traveled numerous times in the Honda Civic. My spare time during the last couple of months has been used creating a bucket list and mapping out the journey. We have over 24 hours of driving within the less than ten days before our arrival in the forested hills of northern Georgia. We’re heading through New Mexico, then across the panhandle into Missouri. The last day will get us into northern Georgia.
After the triple digit celebration, we can take our time on a journey through the American south. We’ll explore across the southern end of Texas, an area neither of us has ever seen, into parts unknown.
As we set off, the numerous preparations have us feeling like we have already been on this trip for a couple of weeks. The plan is to make some distance during the first leg and then take a break, spending a casual day wandering naked through the mountains of the Cibola National Forest.
This National Forest is divided into several regions based on terrain. There is Cibola near Albuquerque, which is less remote than our planned destination. Decades ago, I would cruise the two lane highway 54 north of Alamogordo away from the Interstates, in its timelessness. It is thinly populated, a grassy pinion pine expanse. I have found a section of the National Forest in a range near this place. I have contacted the forest service with a few questions and they concurred that “solitude” can be found. It is about as far as I would care to travel in a day and the isolation gives that potential for safe hassle free nude hiking and camping.
The ocean does have that expansive view that goes somewhere out toward infinity. It accompanies any stroll on a beach. When there is access along a beach as far as my feet might take me, that expansive sense is moved ashore. I remember that in Mexico, strolling along the coast of the Gulf of California. It is desert, so there are many miles where there are no humans, no development, just us.
We are free and alone, safe as far as we see. We take as little as possible to be as naked as possible, surrendered naked in the hands of grace.
We are as naked as the beach is, in touch with every sensation and whim of the natural part of it, the tides, the breeze, the warm sun and vibratory sound of the wave’s crash and the motion against shifting sands.
The shore is often thought of as a boundary, sometimes between countries, sometimes the demarcation of the land and sea. Skin also is thought of that way, the edge of the body, like a castle enclosed in a wall. Clothing holds the gates; it is the walls of protection.
As I walk in the sands near the shoreline, I watch the waves come in, pounding the submissive yet powerful sand, as all shifts. The life, its rhythms, the vibrations are here. Sand changes from soaked with water and back to dry. The sun robs the cool left by the sea and again dries it as the tide ebbs and flows. Sound carries, reflecting changing circumstance. It isn’t a boundary. It is whole and fluid, a copacetic transition.
My stroll in this naked body, not enclosed in its coverings, is warmed. It is also dried, it is cooled, and senses make me aware of the meld and the rapport that this body shares within this world. There isn’t a boundary. There is more to being in this universe and the vibrations have no boundaries.. The cloth boundaries may protect at times, but they shut out a huge part of being.
All is here as one and I am only to observe. This I know because I have torn down the wall of fabric on this beach.
In a season of thanks, I get naked and better feel gratitude.
I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.
It’s just a body. Relax. Take some time to explore being completely naked and with others. It feels really good. No fear here. You will probably come to thoughts like, “Yup, I’ve got one of those, too.” “Oh, that’s interesting.” It is life, a matter of fact, natural, but….
The rules and life in America, from a very early age don’t support those thoughts.
The Free Range Naturist 