It was the summer before I was drafted into the army, the year before Vietnam. I was just eighteen, freshly graduated from high school, and I was driving a small delivery truck, hustling auto parts out to stores. One of the stores was in Malibu, California. I made my delivery and on my way back out to the pickup truck I noticed some pretty girls going into a two-story building. I stopped to look and sure enough, up on the second floor was a beach shop with rack upon rack of bikinis and other beach ware clearly visible through ankle-to-ceiling glass windows.

I was about to leave when I noticed a blonde girl browsing at a rack of bikinis. She was maybe twenty-two or three, somewhat out of my range age-wise, and as achingly beautiful as only a lovely young woman can be. She had already unbuttoned two buttons of the Hawaiian shirt she was wearing. She must have noticed my stopping below because she looked down. Our eyes connected. I smiled.

I shouldn't have smiled, I thought. Reaching too high, figuratively and literally. She looked away, back at the rack of bikinis. My heart sank toward the center of the earth. I started to leave when I noticed she'd opened a third button, then a fourth. I no longer existed to her, she was back to the task at hand, buying a new bikini. She removed the Hawaiian shirt, slung it over the top of the clothes rack, and took a bikini top from a hanger. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts were perfect, round, full, with tiny nipples, and wiggled with every tiny movement of her arms. Her long blonde hair cascaded across her shoulders and down her back. Her skin was golden brown, tinted by the sun, and without tan lines. Soon the bikini top was in place. She turned and looked at herself in a mirror beyond my line of sight. Not satisfied, she removed the top and tried another.

I knew she knew I was looking at her, of course, and at the time I thought she was taunting me, as if to say, "See what you can't have?" Now, with the wisdom of many decades, I think she knew I thought she was beautiful and she was showing me a little more of her beauty, giving me a gift. "Here, this is for you to remember as long as you want."

After a time she chose a bikini, put her Hawaiian shirt back on and went to the counter to pay for the swim suit. I didn't want to meet her when she left the store, so I returned to my pickup truck and moved on to delivering more spark plugs and engine belts. I do remember checking the rear-view mirror as I pulled out of the gravel parking lot to see if she'd left the store, but no luck. She fell into my past at thirty-five miles an hour.

I can't imagine what became of that blonde girl. She could be a grandmother now, or even a great-grandmother with a toddler at her feet. I went to Vietnam, survived, returned to America, survived. Yet every now and again my mind drifts back to that summer day in Malibu, to the girl seen through the window glass, her cascading blonde hair and her gift of beauty.

Richard T

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Letters to Domai, 2 of 2

Hello Mr. Stobblehouse and DOMAI staff,

I think I am very long overdue in expressing my heartfelt appreciation for the work you do on the DOMAI website and related works. I've written twice before briefly, by habit intending to sound professional and succinct for the purposes of billing questions. It is not my habit to send personal communication to those I do business with, though in your case, I should have from the very first day as your customer. In fact, I broke my personal rule of never joining such paid memberships the first day I saw DOMAI.

Any way I phrase this may sound cliche, but in a very literal sense your work has changed my life in many ways, often in a subtle manner. I believe I have always appreciated beauty and nature in its many varied forms. Scenes of sunsets, mountain ranges, grassy fields... I appreciate it all. I have also appreciated the female form, though was not truly satisfied with the only available outlet I knew, the poor substitute of the classier men's magazines. I happened across your website purely by chance while trying to find something like it, without knowing what it was. Your philosophy of natural beauty is exactly what I am looking for. With your beautiful natural women, often set in natural landscapes as background, it is simply a perfect match. The innocence and joy I see in the women having their pictures taken warms my heart like nothing else has. They may not be airbrushed or doctored photographs, but I am glad of it. This is the real thing, real women, not doctored unattainable perfection.

I am male, and that fact alone condemns me in most of societies eyes as being incapable of appreciating this work in anything but a lustful way. I find that this isn't the first time I have disappointed society at large, because I truly am in awe of the pictures I see here. I am not so naive as to hope others I know will accept this truth, so I regret I have to keep the discovery of DOMAI close and quiet, at least until I meet others who feel the same way I do. It is not only the pictures I love, but also the stories I hear of memorable encounters with natural beauty and innocence. They make me smile and imagine what it must be like, for my particular society is conflicted between paranoia of predators, the sin of our bodies, and the lustful images of bodies and sex rampant in the culture. It is a wide contradiction I will never truly understand.

So what am I trying to say with so many words? Thank you. I thank you for brightening my life every day with examples of your philosophy of natural beauty, that I realized I was seeking for a very long time once I found it.

Yours, Jeremy R