Nuddhism and Nature

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.

Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me... Nature was naked, and I was also... Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. --Walt Whitman, A Sun-bathed Nakedness

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 boquet 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?

The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable. --John Muir

Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also. Not too many generations (note: a gen-word) ago, raw nature and wilderness tended to inspire fear and dread in "civilized" people. They represented Otherness and the Unknown. That which is "wild" is also "bewildering".

Today, wilderness is usually considered to be something good and in need of preservation. The beauty and awesomeness of it dominate our attention. We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us. Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real.

We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense. It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other.

To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough.