I’m making no apologies for linking to this post from the Naked Truth blog, and I’d encourage everyone to read the article.

While the pleasure of being naked may differ from person to person, the Naked Truth blog make an exceptional argument as to why we enjoy the feeling of being naked, whether naturist or not.

Even non-naturists will freely admit the feeling of getting out of bed naked and slipping downstairs to make a cup of tea or coffee, waiting for the kettle to boil and feeling the air on your skin is wonderful. In fact, most situations where we are naked in ‘not usually done naked’ situations feel great.

The posting includes photos, one of which I’ve re-posted below because it and a couple of others I was going to use looked perfect for SL replication. Initially I was going to include others which I eventually guessed are of the author and his partner, so I’ve deleted those from the post as I don’t have permission to reuse them.

A naked avatar doesn’t match the real life feeling, but I believe that walking an avatar through a ‘naked’ situation does give a sense of how it might feel in RL, simply because we can choose to plug our senses into the situation and use our imaginations to consider how the RL scenario might be. Lupe’s Forest does this exceptionally well, as you will get prompted while walking through it to ‘smell the scent of pine needles’ and so on. And thus our sense of awareness is heightened, so that a virtual, screen-driven experience does plug us into our memory banks of the scent of pine needles, or the feeling of walking barefoot on grass.

Another wonderful element of the Naked Truth blog is that they’ve included some audio files, sounds of nature (in New Zealand), and I’d urge you to turn the sound up on these, turn the master volume down on your SL viewer, and take a walk through some bit of SL wilderness, trying to imagine the full naked in nature experience. ‘Naked Truth’ isn’t exclusively about naturism. You’ll find articles on George Orwell or Stansted airport, for example but one thing stands out: this is a an enthusiastic and right-thinking naturist writer who will remind us, in an article, of respect being needed for the countryside, an obvious understanding of nature and naturism being part of a larger whole, a larger holistic approach to the planet and our (naked) place within it.

I managed to find a (non naturist) woodland glade, press-ganged my friend Bill to join me, and we captured a few shots of us being naked in nature (thanks for posing, Bill!)

Ella