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What This Book Is And Is Not I want to be careful at the outset about what I am and am not claiming in this book, because the territory is sensitive and the potential for misunderstanding is real and I would rather spend a few paragraphs being precise than spend the entire book being misread. I am not claiming that nudism is a religion. I am not claiming that taking your clothes off is a sacrament. I am not claiming that resort weekends are church or that hot springs are holy water or that the body-positive philosophy of the nudist community is a substitute for the accumulated wisdom of any of the world's spiritual traditions. I am not making a theological argument of any kind, and I am specifically not making an argument that would diminish or disrespect the faith of people like Grace, whose spiritual life I have observed up close for years and which I find genuinely beautiful and genuinely rigorous and genuinely not comparable to anything I do on a Saturday afternoon at a clothing-optional resort. What I am claiming is more modest and, I think, more interesting for its modesty. I am claiming that the practice of nudist living, done honestly and with genuine intention, puts a person in contact with certain questions, certain experiences, certain confrontations with themselves and with the nature of existence, that are recognizably in the neighborhood of what spiritual traditions have always been pointing toward. Questions about the self and what it is underneath all the accumulated layers of performance and conditioning. Questions about the body and whether it is something to be ashamed of or something to inhabit with gratitude. Questions about what it means to be seen, fully and honestly, and to remain in that state without fleeing back into concealment. Questions about what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves and what the relationship between those two debts actually is. These are old questions. They are questions that human beings have been sitting with since before any organized religion existed to provide frameworks for them. They are questions that every serious spiritual tradition I am aware of addresses, from different angles and with different vocabulary and toward different conclusions, but addresses nonetheless. And they are questions that nudist living, at its most genuine, surfaces with a clarity and a frequency and a particular embodied intensity that I think is worth examining seriously. This book is that examination.

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