Simply undress when out hiking where no one is around. Walt Whitman describes the therapeutic result:
A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn’t I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn’d scarlet – then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook . . . stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighbouring black ooze, for unctuous mud-bath to my feet . . .
As I walk’d slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem’d to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also.
(Quoted from page 807 of Whitman: Poetry and Prose, by Walt Whitman. Library of America, 1982.)
For a brief biography of Walt Whitman, click here. For images of or relating to Walt Whitman, click here.
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