Helping vs. Hurting

It has poured the entire day, a relentless, thudding rain that is rare in Berlin, where it spits and then stops and then spits again. This morning, the mountains were shrouded in cloud and fellow residents seem to have disappeared, too; I’ve only seen the odd painter poking her head into the lunchroom. It’s not that much of a mystery; Thanksgiving is coming up, and with it, several fellows ended or interrupted residencies to spend the holidays with family.

The weather urges an interiority that mirrors the need to be indoors, to go farther inside, still, to the un- and sub-conscious; those blackish caverns. It’s a precarious venture, way harder than the Natural Bridge Cavern Tour I took yesterday, but not without its own proverbial invisible shrimp.

I decided to do some yoga this afternoon to alleviate the damp. Yoga here is goofy because I listen to a recording of my regular yoga class in Berlin, which I managed to capture on my iPhone before I left. It is both unnerving and wonderful to have my teacher’s buoyant German voice fill the room, making jokes that I’ve now heard her make six times. I turn down the volume during the chanting at the beginning and end of class, humming softly to myself, which is a very unsatisfying way to “Om” but I’m too self-conscious to belt it out. It seems like there’s always one yoga-obsessed chick in a place like this and I don’t want to be her.

At one point in the recorded yoga class, I’m doing something horribly wrong with a block and my teacher has to intervene. Initially, she tries to help me out from across the room and then has to come over to my mat, as I am apparently making it worse, in order to help me reposition the block. It’s very odd to hear her call my name in my empty room here, hear her steps come closer, hear her say “You’ve got it mixed up,” and hear my own embarrassed laughter and my relieved voice: “Yes, that’s better.” Odd to have recorded someone saving me from myself. In German. Each time I hear my teacher’s invisible approach, now a month old, I tense slightly, and then relax as she straightens the block I no longer have. I just stack up a bunch of old books here, and have to hope that it’s helping, not hurting.