Awkward Pose

Round two for German festival times! This one is the full on day. We wake up in the stew of mud and buses and bands. Thankfully sleeping on the bus usually means sleeping late. Last night was a long time of strange dreams in the dark pod, body jostling across the autobahn. The last one this morning I’m swimming in a clear blue river with girlfriends, laughing. Then I wonder if it’s 2pm. The dreaming self says no, it’s only just 10am, and promptly finds a clock that says so. And then another clock says 2. Confusion in the dream, no more river and friends. I wake up and sure enough it’s 2 and I’m in the stinking field. Almost the last one up. People staggering in boots with garbage bags of belongings and big frothy beers. Well at least it’s 2 and not fresh in the morning 10am with the whole day to go about this place. Grumble grumble. All festy day fears aside though, the day turns out to be just fine. A round of too many catering coffees, feeling like a cracked out bus baby watching others eat weird things like pasta and soup….. more coffee please. Then into the sterile white dressing room with walls like those offices that are built and torn down in a day. Redbull fridge, check. Black furniture, check. Our dressing rooms are most of a hallway along with the Portishead dudes, who I feel like a gawky teenager around. Which is kind of awesome. By this time I’m searching for a yoga spot, and decide it’s in the room where Will is working. “Will is it too creepy if do yoga on you?” “No, is it too creepy if I’m right here while you do yoga?” Mutually agreeing that we’re not creepy, we decide on Gillian Welch for the afternoons soundtrack. This is a new one, practising next to someone and their computer. But by this point in our touring lives, we’re just people trying to do our things in the little cracks of time.

My practice today is a hodge podge of the different schools of thought I’ve been learning from. Actually, a word about daily practice, because I know that term can sound vague if you’re A. not into yoga or B. annoyed by yoga talk (I would then skip this next part). When I’m at home “daily practice” can be 45 minutes of pranayama (breathing) and meditation, while later on I might be teaching classes and taking a class myself. Or it could be a combination of breathing, meditation and the asanas (postures) all at once. On tour I have a sketchier practice. It’s still daily, but somehow often the pranayama and meditation fall away, leaving only the asana. Which feels very partial. My relationship to everything on tour is like this. Eating habits are weird (chips and chocolate at 2am, not even stoned). Some days I wake up at 2pm. Sometimes when I’m checking in at the airport I don’t even know what city I’m flying into “aah, Germany?” The agents love that. So like all these things, the yoga practice gets disjunct. Today I’m in the country of Ashtanga primary series, tomorrow it’s a super intuitive crazy flow- listen to what the body wants. Sometimes it’s Moksha, the series I teach at home, which is gentle and lovely and slow. The thing is I’ve been learning from so many different teachers over the past few years, sponging it up and then making my own sense of all the different philosophies. And some days not much sense, like after a 3pm breakfast of coffee in a plastic room to the sound of Gillian Welch competing with 5 bands playing at once. Today after I’m warm I practice coming from bakasana (crow) to sirsasana II (tripod headstand) to chaturanga dandasana (low push-up). This is the kind of sequence that kind of makes my head spin. And that’s exactly what I want today, in my strange bubble world with few moments of real daylight. That and I don’t want to fall out of fore-arm balance onto sweet Will and the coat rack.

The beautiful thing about today is that there’s an osteopath down the hall and I have a half hour with him. Magic for my knee please! On my way I stumble across another little room where later the ping pong table will be, only now alone in the dark the drummer from Portishead is lying in savasana, blankets and eye cover and all.  So peaceful amidst so much chaos! Funny that we’re not 50 feet from each other, practising our yoga in matching white rooms surrounded by this particular brand of craziness. I’ll have to mention it to him someday.

The rest of the hours trickle by. Tea, small talk, dinner. Watch a bit of the Kills set and get jealous of dudes guitar sound. Watch Portishead again, today they’re having more fun, you can tell. I mostly watch the keyboard player, I’m standing behind him. He’s incredible, plays as if he has three arms. And the crowd beyond him in the wet haze is fully there. Patient and swaying. It’s a rough rainy one today. These folks have been wet, drunk and camping for days, and still have the energy to see countless rock bands. It takes a special kind of human to actually enjoy this kind of situation. So many comfort obstacles! But hey, there’s a giant crane-held Jagermeister bar hanging 50 feet above the main-stage crowd. There’s bungee jumping right there too. And at the end of the night this crowd is happily singing along to us. I get motherly pangs looking out at some of them. And that makes me want to  work harder. I’ll play the shit out of these songs for you, muddy front row kid. Us bands have it easy out here.