My mother’s final words, before I drove away to begin college, came as a surprise. “Whatever you do,” she said, “promise me you won’t model nude for art classes.” It had simply never occurred to me. Until that moment.
I spent my first semester working in the hot and noisy dormitory cafeteria—when not in class, or in the library, buried beneath books. Minimum wage in Idaho was then two dollars and fifteen cents. I must have made somewhat less than five dollars a day for several hours of sweaty labor. A model, I learned early in my second semester, earned seven dollars an hour.
Naked.
An artist’s model, I quickly discovered, is thoroughly comfortable with her nudity. Art students, by contrast, are often visibly ill at ease in the presence of a model. I’ve been on both sides of that curious divide. In my experience, one is rarely more aware of one’s own fundamental state of nakedness than when fully clothed and in the presence of someone who is not.
We’re all naked beneath the clothes we wear, it seems too obvious to point out. And yet, somehow we forget. Or do we? How deeply buried is that awareness? Life, after all, is in some sense a continual process of dressing, of putting on ever more layers to distract from that uncomfortable fact.
Clothing it turns out, is uncomfortably insubstantial. We clothe ourselves most securely in things made not of fabric: values, beliefs, our various identities, preoccupations, and distractions. These are merely adornments. Beneath all of it, we are as we came into the world.
Exposure.
I recall, all these years later, the disorienting moment when I awakened—having fallen asleep in a reclining pose—to find myself naked before a class of nearly thirty students. I was then nineteen or twenty. Had I been drooling? Did I fart? Those first thoughts swept through me in a frisson of horror. And quickly faded. So what? So what if I did or had been?
My brother acclimates himself to the brutal winters of Alaska’s interior by spending time, early in the season, outside without a hat or gloves. In the deep of winter, when the temperature falls below zero, he’s comfortable and outdoors having fun.
What would happen if, like an artist’s model, we disrobed and layer by layer shed all that covers us? What might we find? Might we see more clearly? If nothing else, might we laugh more readily?
I contemplate these questions because, at age sixty-one, I feel an increasingly urgent need to acclimate myself to the last decades of life, to shed all that is encumbering and unnecessary and that blocks me from the most important things.
There are many ways of being naked. Honesty among them. Genuine kindness is another type of exposure as is any willingness to be vulnerable. Love though is perhaps the nakedest of all nakedness.
I want to live and love as nakedly as possible.
Conceptionless, naked, empty awareness is our natural state. From there, anything and everything can and will happen. When the noose of concepts finally breaks, we play with concepts and roles and act until "doer and deed are refined until they're gone." As you ponder, "If nothing else, might we laugh more readily?" Yes, the Bellowing Laugh of the Dakini! Sometimes it's an inside joke though. Most people are not there and will not appreciate the humor in both pleasure and pain. It's an act of compassion to play along, sometimes even with your our own neuroses. Going beyond hope and fear, or at least the willingness and commitment to, we find only Love! Sometimes the expressions of this Love are peaceful, sometimes wrathful, just like actions of a good Mother. We become the Great Mother. We already are Her.