Some people, of course, feel that nature is overly sentimentalized, that the state of nature in which the Noble Savage once lived in harmony with himself and his environment is just a myth engendered in the minds of relatively affluent people by the frustrations of our urban civilization, that it is not now and never was quite so good as it is made out to be.

Perhaps. It may be a myth. But none of us live without our myths. Like art, myth is one of the ways we explain us to ourselves. There is beauty, and truth, as well as pathos in our myths.

Why be naked in nature? It is, after all, not always convenient or comfortable. Sometimes the air is too cold, the sun too hot, the brambles too unforgiving of bare skin, the insects too thirsty for our blood.

But still, our skin is our largest sense organ. Wearing clothes when we don't need them is like wearing a blindfold over our eyes or earplugs in our ears. We miss so much - the warmth of sunlight, the coolness of fog or a waterfall's mist, the caress of the breezes, mud between our toes, a summer rain tunneling down our flanks.

Everything has a price; life is full of trade-offs. Like a street vendor in a middle-eastern bazaar, nature is always offering us incredible bargains. If we don't want his fine, hand-made pottery today, perhaps some rare, imported silks. Because he knows we are uniquely able to appreciate the quality of his wares, he will let us have our choice for an outrageously low price.

What will we choose, if the only price nature asks today is to give up our clothes for a few hours or a day? A taste of freedom? An ample bouquet of new sensations? A feeling of connectedness and belongingness to the natural world?

Yes, and what if we could afford at times to splurge, to be without our clothes for whole days all together, even at the price of occasional discomfort? What then?