Golden Hour

"Golden hour" is one of those photography clichés that I never played around with much. It requires a certain amount of outdoor freedom, at a particular time of day, that maybe I didn't have so much of in the past. I do remember lots of budding teenage girl photographers on flickr taking advantage of it, usually to good (if samey) effect. To be honest, I hadn't even set out to shoot during golden hour. But I'd been doing some lawn work into the evening, on another beautiful, ninety degree day (R.I.P.), and at the end of it I decided on a whim to cool down under the spray from the hose I was using to water some plants. It was exhilarating, and oh so refreshing! I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. Of course, being outdoors, with the water dripping off my body (in the up-to-now rare situation where I can be both naked outside and using a camera), I felt inspired to capture the moment. So you see me here drying off in the sunlight (which is much more satisfying than using a towel), in what just happened to turn out to be golden hour. Serendipity!

I feel like nudists tend to de-emphasize this point (which is disappointing, because it's one of my favorite things about nudism), because it's not all-encompassing (which nudism admirably tries to be) to acknowledge the aesthetic evaluation of people's bodies, and because it also skirts dangerously close to sexuality ("for I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide"), but sometimes the simple addition of nudity can make the world such a sublimely more beautiful place.

I tell you, if there is no room within nudism (although I believe there is) for the admiration of beautiful naked bodies (that doesn't involve the presumption of spontaneous sex orgies - again, I must acknowledge the oft-ignored virtue of the erotic that lies between perfect chastity and outright abandon), then a new lifestyle needs to be invented to honor such a thing (and no, I'm not talking about swinging).

I swear, within nudism or without, there is no allowance for such admiration in anything but a purely perverted and deviant context. Naked is beautiful. Naked is exciting. Naked can also be sexual, but this doesn't have to be the case. Naked can be beautiful and exciting in a PG-context (PG-13, tops), too. That's what I'd like to celebrate on a larger scale.