Three things I’ve noticed or pondered this week.
One: autumn colours. There aren’t a lot of deciduous trees in the suburb where I live, but I still couldn’t help noticing that this year the colours seemed particularly bright. The liquid ambers look luminous; silver birches like something from Rivendell.
Earlier this week I read on the front page of the paper that our ‘autumn leaves have turned richer in colour, more swiftly, than in previous years…experts say a sunny summer followed by good rains and a cold snap means Victoria’s deciduous trees are producing vivid reds, oranges and browns.’ It wasn’t just me then.
In previous, drought stricken years, the autumn leaves, far from boasting vivid colours, looked as though they dropped off their branches in sheer, dull brown exhaustion. It seemed as though they’d simply given up; this year they are going out in a blaze of glory. Another reason to rejoice in the rains we have had, at least for those of us lucky enough not to have been flooded.
Two: the angles of seats. Not something I’d spent a lot of time pondering until I bought a nifty and elegant little meditation stool recently. I prefer to meditate sitting cross-legged, which is all very well, but I tend to slump, and I know that a straight back aids contemplation.
At a meditation class I went to earlier this year, I learnt that it is easier to keep your back straight if your bottom is elevated so that your crossed legs are angled down from your hips. The way I’d always sat, either on the floor or an armchair, my hips were down low with my knees jutting upwards.
Investing in my cute little stool has made a world of difference to my technique and to my aching back. The stool is comfortably padded and is on a slight angle, so that my weight is balanced evenly on my tail and my knees: a lovely, solid triangle that grounds me firmly on the earth.
Since then, I’ve noticed that other types of seats angle forwards. Some piano stools, for instance. Seats where you are intent on some task, almost tipping forward in your eagerness – to pray, to play the piano.
In the oldest chapel in the Benedictine monastery in New Norcia, WA, the hard wooden pews the monks sat in to chant and pray are angled slightly forward like this. The reason, the monk showing us around said, was so that the younger monks wouldn’t get too comfortable and fall asleep during their many hours spent in worship. I tried sitting in them and it was true. I felt so insecure, as though I was about to tip out onto the floor if I didn’t keep pushing myself back up, that I was in a constant state of alertness.
Unlike the pews for the poor monks, comfy chairs, of course, are angled slightly back. They ease you into rest, they almost force you to relax into their embrace. Even firm sofas and armchairs do this.
Dining chairs tend to be flat, as do work chairs. Although these days, with ergonomics a burgeoning science and industry, office chairs can pretty much be at whatever angle you fancy. Which I don’t often think about until I get to work and find that, like the bears and Goldilocks, someone’s been sitting in my chair, adjusting heights and angles so that it’s impossible for me to start work till I’ve fiddled the levers to my satisfaction.
My late father-in-law, who spent time in the army, once told me that during the war he and his mates thought that the absolute height of luxury and comfort was a folding director’s chair. Which is about how I feel when I go camping. And is maybe why one of my favourite things is to sit on a director’s chair on my back verandah, looking through the sparse but still ravishing autumn leaves on our creeping vine.
Autumn colours and the angles of seats. The third thing I noticed this week was something that made me laugh. In a quiet street I walk along every morning on my way to work, there has been a light blue, well-sprung double-bed mattress lying on the pavement. On Thursday, it had been propped up against the row of letter boxes belonging to a block of orange brick flats. And on it, in beautiful cursive script, this graffiti: ‘Dick head! Hard rubbish was last week’.