Outside the alcove, a mass of steamy air hovers like a phantom cloud bank, perfumed with sage. As I wait to dry, there resurfaces a distant memory of playing, at age 10, in the mud of our disheveled garden in Los Angeles after a rain, of paddling through the sod where flowers strain to see the light and worms bury, little root shards caught in my hair. Mud is a naturally delicious and healing medium. Children know this instinctively. In the Dead Sea, mud is an elixir for body and soul.
People pay good money to languish in peat moss and mud bogs all over the world.
The grand finale, the icing on the flesh cake, so to speak, is a massage. I cannot imagine more body work because I cannot imagine my body at all. It is in a buoyant, empty state, a fully euphoric feeling that is perpetuated in this happy inferno by the presence of so many negative ions. My masseuse is a French woman whose name, perhaps because at this point my brain has parked the car in neutral and walked away with the keys, I cannot recall. Throughout history, the greatest masters of medical rubbing were the blind, their sense of touch heightened by their lack of sight.