By Finnuala Brett

 

This summer, I remembered what it meant to open myself to the world. I remembered with my full body, with the exaltation of bare flesh and vulnerability, and with what felt like a freedom I had forgotten. Open, like the unfolding fingers of a sleeping hand, caught in the sunlight. Like the gentle crook of an arm, soft skin inside, the nape of a neck where the hair falls away. Like the slit of an eye, glistening under lashes to watch the same leaking blue marry the sea and sky.

 

I had come to rest in a place that let me live in the most blissfully simple way. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the earth’s warm embrace eased open a tender core inside me. As I lay bare under the sun, my nude vulnerability invited an understanding between myself and the world, a communication otherwise untransmutable, a shared language of being reached only in openness.

 

Openness as transparency, non-judgment, and a full understanding with the whole body and mind. Openness as generosity, and as community. Openness as the flow of communication and care, between people and the earth’s offerings. Escaping definition, it becomes rather a state of mind and a practice of values.

 

Why had it been so difficult to remember the value of openness? Why did I remember with such force of body and mind so suddenly in those moments?

 

If I search hard enough, I find in openness the echoes of a youthfulness I once belonged to. Trials of adolescence perhaps had wrung the innocence from me, encasing any left within a fragile shell. Adulthood had come along in a series of life changes that had, at the time, felt wonderfully responsible; yet responsibility had made me too sensible, too individual. It was as if something had grown to protect me from the rawness of the world and translate it instead into a system of codes that fitted neatly within the rigidity of the place I lived in.

 

Nudity became, briefly and sweetly, a catalyst for a conscious practice of openness. Embracing bare-skinned living on that island for those few idyllic days was the most utterly liberating bodily experience I could have imagined. I felt at once more childlike and more womanly than anytime else, strung between glee and ecstasy and the sensuality of my body. My body breaststroke-swimming underwater, eyes open to watch shafts of light dance down through the blue, the blurred ghostly shapes of my companions swimming at the surface. My body in the evening, sun prickling hot on my torso, sinking into the cradle of earth.

 

Phenomenologists say that the body is a means of knowing. Through somatic, tactile engagement with the world, we learn things that do not need to be spoken and communicate sensorially in a way that transcends codification. The immediacy and honesty of our bodies allows an openness beyond the physical. Nudity allows an openness beyond the physical.

 

Whilst opportunities for self-expression and socialising proliferate in adulthood – not least with social media – the structures of life’s days often feel as though they are built for individuals. I feel this most in our cities in the lack of third spaces between homes and workplaces for us to simply exist, together, in the world. Carving out the space and time for coexistence and deliberately non-productive living can be so difficult. As much as I care for myself and honour my individuality, the nourishment of openness is irreplaceable; the literal casting off of clothes, and of codes, became a way of understanding this.

 

Just as the communion of my body with the land helped me re-open myself, the community of friends I met there taught me to embrace it. They lived so bodily and boldly that I felt domesticated, dressed in codified lifestyles, habits and desires whilst these people committed so wholeheartedly to the place and people they most love. Slipping into their purest self and humanness, they lived in the most instant sense: agile and joyful and infinitely grateful for life’s bare essences.

 

They greeted us with warm smiles, that first evening. Sat under the shade of the tree on the beach, we wrung the sea from our hair and let the seaweed dry sticking to our skin, talking as if we had known each other for a long time. We shared our nakedness quietly, with no feeling of sexualisation but instead a calm openness towards one another and the beautiful place we lay in.

 

It was also in the long hours of days like this, with companionship like this, that I felt the most anchored in my body. She grows me goosebumps in the cool of the ocean, lets me smell the fragrant warmth of Adriatic dusks, and she will not be mine forever. As she lay bare under the sun and my own gaze, I realised she had aged as I have lived in her; yet now I reconnected so instantly, so strongly with my youthfulness. As I swam for the last time, clinging onto every sensation, I felt suddenly more rooted in myself and more open to myself than I had in a long time.

 

It was odd to say goodbye. In the space of so few days there had grown a genuine warmth and understanding that now hurt to leave behind. As the lull of waves faded into cicadas, I turned to look at my friends. I couldn’t speak because none of us knew what to say. Their faces looked mournfully back at me, lit softly in the sun’s late glow. Whilst these people stay in that fantasy-life so far outside my normal existence, I have come back home. This community of people had been inextricably interlinked with my reconnection with youth, the experience of my womanhood in nature, and the new and multidimensional openness I found myself experiencing.

 

The transience of our time there consumed me with sorrow. The worst part was the sensation that it was all simply a dream. The time we had spent reminded me of those stories, fictionalised in the children’s books I used to burrow into; too fantastic, too hazy in the rigid time I have returned to, too rich in substance to possibly have been true. The new openness I had nurtured threatened to slip into the past, tethered to place instead of self.

 

Openness, much like nudity, becomes a way of engaging with the world through our whole bodies and minds, discarding prejudices and practising non-judgment. Both ask us to reorientate and reconsider our relationships with the world and each other; both are equalising and humanising practise. In an increasingly individualistic and closed society, these values have never felt more important or more elusive.

 

But openness is not rigidly tethered to place any more than it is rigidly tethered to any condition. Leaving behind the place that nurtures these values does not mean they become inaccessible again; leaving behind that community of people doesn’t mean I will forget how to forge my own.

 

My own experience of nudity and community became a catalyst to reaching a conscious practise of openness, and knowing I have the capacity for that openness will remain enough. I had been able to step beyond the codes I lived within, recognise them, and return with an awareness of what I needed to become a better version of myself.

 

If there is anything to remember from those days, it is to love my body, to listen to it, to let it teach me about the world, and to let it be open to vulnerability for the sake of a richer life. To let people understand me deeply and to listen to them, so that I may understand them deeply too.