I crossed the small, wooden picket fence, stationed in the sand, and I immediately knew that I had crossed through a portal into a world back in time where humans were blissfully unaware of the need to cover their naughty nether regions.

I had entered the part of the beach known as clothing optional.

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to embark down to the nude section of the beach that Saturday afternoon. I had been living in Miami for almost six months, yet I had not dared to venture there alone.

Fortunately, a group of friends were visiting and propelled me to literally step out of my comfort zone and out of my swimsuit.

Right away, my stomach tensed up as I saw the first naked bum. Something about seeing a naked body without so much as knowing the person’s name felt absolutely foreign. My brain’s processing circuits began to misfire, and I was unaware how to engage with the current situation.

I quickly darted my eyes to the sand by my feet as our group found a place to settle in to this new world of breasts of all shades and hundreds of dangling baby makers out limp and swinging. Once my body’s alarm system synced into resonance that I indeed wanted this experience, my body began to relax.

Yet, I had not even taken off my own articles of clothing.

I was a newbie, and like anything in the world, the first time will always be the hardest. The feeling in your stomach is nearly the same each time your soul yearns to try something new, although your body’s nervous system is signaling to you to abort the mission!

Whatever the risk that day, I was willing to take it for the transformation that I believed would quickly ensue.

I was a true virgin in the realm of being naked with anyone other than my sexual partner, but I was now ready to lose it, my nude beach virginity.

My boobs had never even so much as seen the light of day, as their color was so close to snow bunny white when I released them from their prison on that warm May afternoon.

I locked them away for 24 years believing I should be ashamed of this part of myself. I was taught that nipples are sexual and hard, but that day, they were soft and were gracefully greeted by the ebb and flow of the ocean waves paired with the golden sun.

I gave in.

I wanted that ocean to devour my naked being just in the same way my sexual soul craved a man’s touch. I wanted to give my all—my whole essence—to be swallowed, and then I released my back onto the saltwater sand.

Therefore, of course, I ran to that ocean and never looked back. During the four hours of openly soaking my whole being in the sultry sun, I transformed internally from a state of fear to that of true reassurance. The reassurance was not not only of my womanly power while feeling the sweet saltwater caress my unmentionables, but reassurance that I was not alone.

I was now a new soul with a truly deep appreciation of warm saltwater on naked flesh and an enlightened perspective on the human body. We are not made of this earth to be clothed and caged, no but we are made to walk freely into the natural world.

Of course I am not a prude, and I understand the societal need and context where clothes indeed should be a requirement, yet I realized on that day that our human bodies, imperfect and wrinkly, are all a work of divine art driven from the soil and painted by the stars.

I transformed that day because I was able to experience being embraced by the world the way I came out from the womb: naked, innocent, and with my whole entity expelling love.

The memories of the breasts I saw and the penises dangling in the hot sand will quickly fade, yet that beautiful feeling will never leave me— that feeling of being accepted into the earth as my raw self with not even tiny bikini straps to hold my pride.

Thank you Haulover Beach for your lesson. This is one I hope you, dear reader, can soon experience for yourself: walking through the portal of perspective a place such as this provides.