Thursday, October 18, 2012

Feng Sh**

Hot Pink Chocolate Birthday Queen
I love Feng Shui.  It's added some challenge, spiritual significance, brain-food and fun to my FAVORITE chore of all time: housekeeping. I like to try to figure out logical explanations for chi and the rules. Like, it makes sense to me that if the corner of the room you first see upon entering is clutter free, it will make the sensation of walking in to that room lighter. Keep mirrors away from your bed; I sometimes awake in the middle of the night to see an unknown figure standing near me, imagine if that was doubled by a mirror! I would scream twice as loud! And if your stairways, hallways, and entryways are cluttered and difficult to enter, it's going to make it hard to move around your house and you'll get lethargic and overwhelmed. And if the photos of people in your house are always turned towards each other, I can see how subconsciously that might give you a sense of co-operation.

Ione, WA Train Ride
As a woowoo-leaning Libra who has noticed she is deeply affected by her surroundings (as Libra's are wont to be), it was only a matter of time before Feng Shui and I met and started dating. It was destiny. And being in the analytical triad of Libra, I like to suss out what causes these feelings. Take good luck charms. Are they really full of magic? Or are they as full of magic as we imbue them by believing it so. And, as the psychological "sciences" point out, the luckier you think you are, the luckier you actually are because you are open to finding and receiving positive experiences. If you aren't convinced that nothing good ever happens to you, you'll be able to see the ocean of cool experiences we're actually swimming in.  And if you want a charm to convince you of it, then take it, and believe in it whole heartedly and it will be truer than not.

So in my weekly thrill through the library, I picked up another book on Feng Shui, to inspire more decluttering and to find out what else I could do to feel awesome in my home and to create awesomeness for everyone who enters it, to allow the flow of awesome to come and go and radiate from my little Shinto shrine of awesomenity. And there were some good new ideas in the book.  If you feel ugly, clean out your wardrobe.  Certainly, clothes that don't fit and yet you feel obligated to wear because they are perfectly good isn't a way to waltz into the world with your head held high.  And torn unders can't do much for you either.  I purged chipped dishes (that could still be used for small snacks!) and noticed my purse was old and stained (the toll of time creeps in on these daily implements) and gleefully upgraded to shiny and new and 50% off.

Then.  Enter the woowoo-ness.  The "put an amythist under your bed to protect your marriage" part of the book.  I'm paraphrasing here because I flung the thing back to the library, but apparently there's this Five Fingers of Yellow Death that rotates clockwise around your house, taking up 30 degrees for a whole year and if you touch anything in that area, you subject your home, your wealth (such at it is today), your health and that of everyone you come in contact with to grave danger (ooo-ooo-oooo).  And then there's the Sergeant of Deadly Arrows who occupies a full 1/2 of your house every year.  No remodeling there.  The author admits it's a pain in the rear, but she doesn't mess with it.  In fact, in order to avoid the Five Ochre Fingers, she removes ALL objects from the 30 active degrees of Jaundiced Death Digits for the entire year and closes it entirely off.  Well, I'm sorry, but at that point we'd officially crossed a line from curious brain-food in to total horse-sh**.

Moving on, I decided to shine up our entry, touch up the paint, refresh the front door, etc.  In non-woowoo terms, this is so that when we come home, we do not feel we are entering a depressing pit of dilapidation where entropy is out of control.  But in order to do that, I would have to sort through a daunting basement closet where the previous owners left veritable pyramids of paint cans. So there, I'd identified a place of clutter that was gumming up the works.  So I cleared it out, toted a load of cans to the dump. Unfortunately, I accidentally took the empty can of dining room paint,  throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and now I have no idea what that color is. In order to do "touch up" I'll now just have to buy a whole new color and paint the whole damn thing. And that, my friends, is where F*** Shui began.

homestead grave yard- ooooh-oooh
I swept out the closet, put in a shelf, reorganized and now I have an easy to access, easy to understand home repair center.  And within minutes a most promising cow buyer fell through.  I broke about 5 dishes in one extraordinarily clutzy evening.  I charred dinner.  I failed to take care of several key paper-work type things. I got a bill for my duck egg fiasco which included two doctor visit charges (one of which my insurance rejected as absurd; that's what they told me) because, the office said, I had to be held for observation for so long and they said I should just be thankful I'm alive because it was clear I was close to not being so and a funeral OR ER visit would have been 5x as much, never mind I was the ONLY patient they had and my occupation of the room did not constitute any extra expense or lost revenue opportunity. This and that and then Huck came home and that's when he tore his calf muscle, with it's attendant ER bill (yet to be recieved), plus his inability to lift all the heavy things (chicken coops that need to go into the barn now) or that might have been acquired, like free ovens.  The Sh*ticane Feng had made land fall on our farm.

Curious about what Feng Shui might say about it, I discovered that the closet I cleaned out was the ONLY space in our house that was in the Five Fingers of Mustard Morbidity this year.  According to this book, it was the only place in the house I should not have decluttered, not this year anyhoo. Had the page about these fingers somehow influenced my subconscious?  And yet how could my subconscious tear Huck's calf muscle and double charge me for a doctor's visit? Especially since I hadn't really read the whole page or done the math to figure out what segment of my house was under siege?  Or was this woowoo-iest version of Feng Shui the real one?  Was there really a Colonel of Destruction residing, even now, in chi-form in half my house?  Could these Six Fingers really take down our whole family?  Could the power of positive thinking, could the LAW OF ATTRACTION counter Feng Shui?  Do the five fingers play paper-scissors-rock with Learned Optimism and Abraham and the Hicks? What trumps what? 

Popeye and kids
I found that my only possible Feng Shui prayer would be a Hail-Mary bowl of dirt.  And since my subconscious had already read that, I figured that if I put a bowl of dirt in the closet, my subconscious could rest easy and stop harassing my life.  But if I used positive thinking to combat fear of Five Fingers by say, denying Five Fingers exists or that it has power, by insisting the Five Fingers are a peasant-Chinese, non-scientific grab for explanation, ie: superstition, then if Five Fingers really exist, will I totally piss it off and a nuclear bomb will drop on Lucky Farm's East by SE corner? Note: we haven't specified what kind of luck this farm has! Or will the Force of the Fingers diminish it's imaginary power that resides solely in my head?

You know that discussion about "If I didn't know about Jesus, would I still go to hell?" And the missionary, compassionate and kind, says, "No."  And the proverbial Eskimo says, "They why did you tell me?"  So that's why I brought the book back.My thoughts are powerful. My imagination more so. And my subconscious supremely so. I need a sign above my door: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," perhaps?  Nah. How about something like "Don't Feed Inhabitants Superstition?"

Gun safety lessons (plus can shooting) with Opa
But things are improving.  Huck's leg is slowly healing as healing is the natural state of life, until it isn't. And I forgot we have this new, posh health care debit card, so the bills will get taken care of before the next millennium.  The front door is refreshed. The rotten board in the front porch is replaced (no thanks to me! Demo looks so fun when Huck and his dad do it; how hard can it be? A crow bar and some elbow grease, I'm loaded with that! And then I destroyed every board around the board I was trying to remove. Huck was able to fix most of my damage and replace the correct board, LAYING down!), and stained. The bills are all paid.  The pantry is full.  My birthday was an awesome cabin-stay in Ione with a train ride, thanks to my adventure-planning mother.  My vote for most magical human invention? autumn.  The kids are great.I mean, listen to this, my daughter gets to go to a school where the term "Geeky" is synonymous with ye ol' "Rad" and "Da Bomb." The marriage is currently cozy and affectionate. The house, sturdy.  My health, superb.  My creative endeavors rockin' on.  All the animals are well-fed and fine. And the sunrises are sublime, as always. And I think the crystals in the Southeast corner are finally working!



1 comment:

  1. Thanks Sara! FS is just a euphemism for good architecture. Some of us go to school for this.



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