Naked in Nature

A Coming of Age Adventure and Wild Awakening at the Grand Canyon

This month we are on an epic trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in celebration of my momentous 50th birthday. While we are even further off the grid than usual, I thought I’d share with you this post from last summer, so you can better understand why the GC is so meaningful to me. See you on the flipside!

Before the Map Was an App

The first time I spontaneously got naked in Nature, I was nineteen years old. My best friends and I were taking a road trip across the country between my freshman and sophomore years of college. We were choosing places to visit based on where we had places to crash.

This is 1994. There is no Internet or cell phones or GPS. I ordered a trip route off of Triple A, a desk sized wire-bound booklet of maps with your requested journey highlighted for you across multiple pages, depending how long the trip. Our journey started in New York and took us to West Virginia, Memphis, Oklahoma, and rapidly across the Texas panhandle where cops notoriously pulled people over for weed, which was all illegal back then. We went to New Mexico because our close friend was going to the now defunct College of Santa Fe on Saint Michael’s. From there we headed west toward California where we had a friend in La Jolla.

Searching for Something Sacred in the Desert

Natural Born Killers was a popular movie at the time and romanticized the idea of taking peyote in the desert with shamans. This is before Ayahuasca journeys were a popular tourist adventure. I was reading Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Way as we traversed Arizona.

We didn’t have peyote, but we had plenty of cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms which we micro-dosed (before that was a word) at the Petrified Forest National Park. Climbing over the ropes intended to keep tourists out we took to the desert like tarantulas roaming in search of something we could not describe, shoving our pockets with petrified wood. Later, we petrified ourselves when we saw warnings of bubonic plague, naively believing we surely contracted it on our sojourns.

But it was the Grand Canyon that truly blew my mind.

Perhaps one day the shirtless photos will reappear but for now this is the only one I have. Me and my dear friend, Dori, circa ‘94. Photo taken solely for printing memories, no concept of social media or digital photos in existence. Note walking rain in background.

My Grand Canyon Moment

Driving around the bend, the view opened to the gaping wide-open heart of Mama Earth calling out to me as if from beyond time and space, reaching its multi-layered melodious colored canyon walls into my deepest crevaces. I began to cry. We hadn’t even gotten out of the car yet.

My first sight of the goddess’s own goblet, a glorious canyon larger than my little New York suburbanite brain ever could have conceived of had me bleeding tears of clay. I jumped from the car to the ledge and the immensity of it all overwhelmed me. My friends pulled out their cameras (yes, real cameras with film) and I pulled off my clothes.

My white tee shirt flew off my shoulders exposing my unbound breasts to whomever might have been in view. I didn’t know or care. On the south rim, tourists are common but perhaps less then than now and perhaps more dispersed. We did not have social media and the idea of “if you don’t post it, it didn’t happen” did not exist then. We did not do things in order to be “seen” or get external validation via likes and clicks from strangers. These concepts didn’t exist yet and so our frame of mind was different. I might argue freer. Freed up from the slavery of the constant pursuit for validated visibility, proof of life.

The Wild Feminine

I was never the “naked type,” so I’m not sure what came over me to be so publicly displayed. No, wait, I do know. The Grand Canyon came over me. I felt like baring my entire being and succumbing to her raging wild spirit. My friends stopped me short of removing my bell bottoms. I raised my arms to the sky as if to say, take me now, I want in.

We laughed about it, of course, for years. It was a joke. Johanna took her clothes off at the Grand Canyon. I didn’t think too much of it then.

But now I know. Now I know more fully than I ever have what caused me to expose myself in that way. Nature. The wild feminine spirit. I had been so separated from that for so long, living a life of city clubs and academia and shopping malls and fast food. Something about the deep canyon wider than the eye can see that lit a deep fire in my heart.

Born for the Desert

Today, I live at the edge of another deep canyon in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument Park, not as monumental as the Grand Canyon but a monument none the less. Living here is a full circle for me from that first time I visited the southwest and we took a side trip to Taos to walk across the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, carving our names in the rail. I don’t know why I was born in New York when I was born for the desert. Red rock canyons hearken my soul back to a time primordial when I slept beside the fire deep within the fertile riverbeds fortified by lava rock walls. I never get tired of the rock formations of the southwest.

My Return to the Grand Canyon

I have been back to the Grand Canyon twice since 1994. Again, to the south rim and once to the north rim and every time I am blown away by the beauty.

View from the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Can’t find the rainbow pic unfortunately. Isn’t she amazing?

Last time we were there in 2018, I beckoned my husband and daughter out in a rainstorm to the rim of the canyon where the sky lit like fire. They fussed a bit at crazy mom for making them stand in the cold wet wind. But then, as if the desert goddess herself wished to gift me for my dutiful worship, a rainbow appeared over the canyon in deep violent hues and I cried, again, at her magnificence.

Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Share your memories! I’d love to hear from others who are equally obsessed with her.

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