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I love being naked, everyone knows this. In the summer, I wish I could be naked all the time. When I am at home I am usually naked, I sleep naked, sometimes I cook naked.
A woman named Timbre taught me how to be naked. I met her in college, outside of a supermarket. She was looking for a housemate and after speaking with her for a couple of minutes I think she gave me a piggy back ride around the parking lot while I laughed to my core being.
She’s from North Carolina, and was raised in the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains and luscious forests. She has a Southern twang and called everyone “darlin” or “sweetpea” or “sugar”. She was boisterous, drowned all of her food in hotsauce. She had crazy red hair and freckles. We became instant friends.
This was very soon after I had moved back from Korea and was settling into the culture shock of not only the U.S., but also the South. I went from a densely metropolitan city where everyone was Asian, to a small town where there were so few Asians, some people thought I was black, since I was clearly not white.
Korea was a country that was extremely traditional and reserved. Timbre was the exact opposite.
She was always naked, because she grew up running through the woods naked. She would walk around the house and try to sit on me, she would make deranged faces and noises to make me laugh (she was in the drama department), and everything she did was inappropriate and boundless. I loved it. I think she even answered the door for the pizza delivery guy naked a few times.
She was comfortable being naked. She was in her element. She just had a baby, and I know she will raise him to be a blithe naked spirit as well.
Because she was always like this, and her quotidian nudity became standard, it impacted me and set the stage for my own comfort with being naked. Before Timbre, it never even occurred to me to lounge around naked. I was brought up with nudity being improper unless you were showering. I was beginning to understand the freedom of being naked. It was comfortable, and it was right.
It is because of her, I have no inhibition about nudity.
As mentioned on Day 6, I used to throw elaborate parties and the year I moved to New York I threw a Matrix Halloween party. Since clothing is an integral part of halloween, I went out and purchased sunglasses, black neckties and tie clips for everyone and now have a boxful of the leftovers. I’ve kept the box because I did not want to be wasteful, but I am doing nothing with them currently.
So on day 24 of my 365 Release, I am letting go of these ties and clips to anyone that wants them. Ties are clothing accessories, and in some ways, clothes themselves are accessories as well.
May we all be closer to naked, so that we may all be closer to finding our freedom.
[I created the 365 Release Project to practice non-attachment, letting go and change by giving away 1 thing a day for 1 year. The background, vision and guidelines to the 365 RELEASE project are here. The running list of everything I have released is here.]
and just like that all of the ties have been claimed. thank you everyone for being a part of this practice. it means so much to me.