How to Feng Shui yourself totally
by Jena Griffiths
If Marie Diamond (feng shui guru of gurus) is right, the only solution for my house is to pick it up from where it is right now, shake vigorously to rid it of clutter, then place it down gently at a completely different angle, preferably on the other side of the hill. It would also help to change the directions that the drains run and maybe flatten our neighbour’s house to stop it pointing poison arrows at our front door. Then there’s the question about whether this change would be big enough to shift the house from a period 7 to a period 8 home and what would happen to all the conflict and disaster stars as a result? They would have shifted and hopefully flushed themselves all down the toilet in the process, leaving only abundance and laughing Buddhas in their wake.
Just as I thought I was getting into the swing of the whole subject along comes a second New Year, kind of like a reverb wave that slaps you off your surf board when you’re not looking. Did you know, it starts today? It’s called the year of the Earth Rat and basically it means that the bubbling fountain I’ve just bought isn’t such a good idea anymore.
This reminds me of a period in my life many years ago (more or less another lifetime) when I was studying to be a meteorologist. I kid you not!! What I learnt from this brief escapade with science is that the more you know about anything, the less you know. This was Cape Town University in the 80’s and everyone on campus knew that all you had to do was look out over the Cape Flats and note which way the plume was blowing off the Plumstead cooling towers. You could see in a flash if it was going to rain or not within the next 24 hours. Then I went inside and filled my head with differential equations and convoluted theorems about moving fluid predictions and got so thoroughly confused that I couldn’t have cared less what wind actually was let alone what it was planning to do next.
The only thing I remember from that whole year was a wonderful poem in one of our text books that summed the whole subject up rather neatly. It said, ‘Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity and little whirls have smaller whirls and so on to viscosity. I think the same applies to Feng Shui. The more you know about this topic the less you know and, what’s more, there are whirls within whirls that make the predictions more and more complex.
I mean, just when you think you have all your chimes and bamboo shoots and Buddhas in the right corners along comes another year to shift everything around, putting a whole new spin on every object in your home. Now I hear that there are monthly shifts too so the whole thing starts to look more and more like the prediction of fluid dynamics on an energetic level, except you’ve got Chinese trial and error to rely on instead of differential equations. So maybe that’s a good thing! Actually seeing a mushroom cloud is easier to comprehend than e=mc2.
There’s a fine line between science and superstition. I think the only difference is whether you’re doing it yourself or simply observing from a distance. As they say about the law of attraction, emotion is the fuel and what you focus on blows up in your face. Maybe that’s the thing about Schrodinger’s cat that got overlooked? Which corner was it the lying in at the time and was the box period 4 or 5? Because that would change the disaster stars for the cat totally and thereby determine whether an optimist or a pessimist was the next one to open the box!
The more I ponder this whole complex subject the more I think there is only one real solution:
Buy a tent and sleep in my garden!
This article was first published in 2007.
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