Awkward Pose

My head is always spinning a bit after playing and hanging out in Austin. I’m super crushed out on this place!

The town couldn’t be more different from the wet coast island I grew on or the eternal winter of Montreal. I think somewhere within me lies a cactus, and I dig on the hotness. And the amazing extremes- Dive bars and yoga studios. Strip malls and design explosions. Fried tacos, raw tacos. Avocado margaritas, avocado hemp smoothies. You get the picture. 

So the days off in Austin were full of these things and I couldn’t have been happier. My Austin family is a new one, but these new friends feel like old ones. We did living room yoga to stretch out their sore legs from doing the Hill Country Ride for AIDS (yay for all those riders!). Other activities included attempting to overdose on texas watermelon, finding beautiful empty bars (clearly not SXSW week!), walking in the beautiful green belt, eating gingerbread pancakes at Magnolia cafe.  And once again at Allen’s Boots I decided that ladies cowboy boots are much too insane looking for me. Have they always been that way? 

We posse’d up to Black Swan Yoga, a sweet donation based studio that is full of youngsters. I’ll tell ya, vinyasa studios love their playlists, and this tour I keep showing up to classes that rock the AF. Hip openers to the Suburbs, surya A’s to Haiti. Hah! Talk about working with distraction….go inwards go inwards go inwards. Which reminds me of the first time that happened, and it still makes me laugh so hard I should probably digress. 

A few years ago while visiting home, my mother brought me to her East Vancouver workout class, a lovely bunch of Van Groovies jamming out with dance, pilates and yoga. The snobby part of myself was already resisting this activity a bit. But I tried to go with it…you know. And then all of a sudden it was interpretive circle dance time and on came Laika, blasting through the speakers. West coast baby boomers going expressively wild and me in the corner, lying down at the bottom of mt. embarrassment. Not going with it. It was…..really funny.

But where was I? Oh yes, sun salutations to Haiti. Really not a big deal as it turns out. Vancouver primed me. And back to my love of Austin. There is this group of teens that we made a short film with a year ago. And they rule. My friends and I came back to the hotel and found a bunch of the band hanging with some of these kids in the lobby, just sitting on the floor playing games. One of them started doing magic tricks, and then everybody was doing tricks- teenage boys are so awesome like that. Someone started yelling about yoga and pretty soon we were all throwing down our jackets and doing headstands on the lobby floor- even some people from the bar joined in. These boys were totally rocking eagle and downward dog, talking about their moms. It was super cute and made my heart melt.  

My friend Eli in Austin is a great listener and theorizer. She recently started going to Black Swan and is really taking to it. So when I mentioned I was writing a blog from a touring musician/yoga teacher/student perspective, she got really thoughtful. We were driving around talking about yoga and things and she just piped up- “You know, a lot of my relationships have felt like chair pose.” Personally, I always find it hard to play the “what yoga pose is this thing in life?” game, I’m either way too literal or I turn everything into a joke. But I love when other people do it. What Eli seemed to be saying was that of course there was this constant challenge in the work of chair pose- being a super strengthening pose, but beyond that, she has a tendency to hike her shoulders up and round her back- making the it really difficult to be in the pose for a long time. When she could drop her shoulders and open her heart, it felt better and more sustainable. Yes! (I normally don’t use people’s names here but she said it was ok).

See now I’ve written so much about Austin and nothing about the show! I fear writing too much in this here entry, so I’ll keep this part short. The Backyard is a beautiful summer camp vibe venue. The crowd in Austin is so energetic and giving it’s impossible to have a bad show. It was a dreamy rock music on a hill dance party that we got to be a part of- giving it out from stage and getting it back tenfold from the people. That being said, I also now know what it’s like to have to pee during an entire set. The urge came upon me when we first stepped on stage, and grew like a gnawing beast for the following what seemed like eternity. So while I knew it was a great show, it was also a physical battle. But it made me think about how it would feel to perform with something more serious going on in the body. After all, my step was only pained for that hour and some- and a sprint to the bus bathroom before encore gave me the best Ready To Start of the tour. 

Ok, next up, Houston!

xo Sarah.