When I step into Asana, I think of the woods of Finland. A little building perched partway up a hill, just at the edge of the forest, a witch's house in a fairy tale, a big stack of birch wood logs beside it. Just a forest, spreading out behind. You step inside and take off your clothes, like preparing for a ritual because you are. And move across the damp interior boardwalk, thinking about the beach towns of your childhood, until you reach the basins of cold water you will douse yourself with. There's no freezing lake, but it's bracing. And then comes the second entering, the step into heat, the delirium that sets in at 120 degrees. A little window that shows you the forest, as you feed logs into the roaring fire and pour water over the rocks. Put in those woods in the early spring, before the heaviest rains in the mosquitoes, the trees already dripping, my blood felt sweet and full of green, and I felt humid. So overwhelmed by the presence of something, the old god made of wet dirt and the slight decay that brings the greater growth. I sank down to my knees at the foot of a tree and felt myself so far inside my own body that its borders reached the canopy. I remember the vision of my first night in that country. I dreamt of a beast who came to me with the face of a kind, rough man, with antlers blundering forth from his forehead, his body and mystery of limbs, muscles with a scent like dirt. Like the creature who crawled over me in a field in Wisconsin, when I prayed hard, whose holy body was all soil, all soil, and deep wishes. They seemed to come from the same strange place, hovering outside my range of vision. So to the weight of air I felt upon me that I thought was Alexander's ghost. This beast eats hay and roasted meats and dreams, the first few breaths of spring, songs in an unknown language. When the sun rises so early that the morning still holds the secrets of the night, old pagan gods will come to put their tongues inside our mouths and remind us that we too are made of spring. In my early childhood we bent the saplings together. We lashed them with twine into shape, swaddled them with blankets, built our little lodge out in the field, ted making the fire, feeding it for hours until the fire was so much more than my little body. I never knew how he could be so close, how he could take that heat and carry it, stone by stone into the place we built so we could crouch there, sweating in the belly of a warm beast. In my most holy moments, and by a holy I perhaps mean most true, most worthy of remembrance, most of a gift to myself and to others, most present and again most true. In my most holy moments, I am in two places at once, and by two I mean one plus many. So often the state of hovering a few inches above my body is the vantage point I have been prescribed, a method of preservation, of perseverance, of parsing out, or is it the perspective with which I have been diagnosed, a given circumstance, this doubling, a necessary condition on a bullet to the list. But in my moments of greatest joy, I have slid back inside myself, a penetrated image, not a soul living in a fleshy nest, but one organism containing many, an orchestra all playing the same song with different notes. Myself is my body, but my body is also the leaves in the forest and the rain dripping from them. You said that the last thing that either of us needed was more flesh, and I agreed because flesh is sometimes the synonym for pain, but now I wonder what if I could just keep adding, to grow immense and fleshy and expansive, like Tetsuo destroyed by my incomprehensible vastness. I think of scraps of language, the body's largest organ, and I think the medium is the message, the medium is the body, and the message is death. But as I fall asleep to descriptions of human forests, dappled light and damp sunbeams, this thought does not distress me. As in my holiest moments, I become so aware of my body, and yet that embodiment is everywhere. All that sweat holds it all together. And in the end, we all float out, like steam.