Go With the Flow

Mo tackles her home's feng shui emergencies, and buys some beautiful new shit in the process

Looking for advice on how to angle your bamboo flutes on the wall? Turn to Feng Shui For Dummies.

Image credit: Feng Shui For Dummies

Recommended by the Editor

To Post or Not to Post?

Culinary Compromise

By: Mo Perry |   January 2012   |  From the print edition

Ah, the new year. A time of adjustments and vows to improve. This year, I’m doing something a little different. I’m resolving to let my furniture do the hard work for me.

A few months ago I shared a dressing room with an actress who was on a feng shui kick. My limited knowledge of the practice was mostly cobbled together from articles in Cosmo (“12 Feng Shui Tips for Hotter Sex and Flatter Abs”), and consisted of the basics: Place your bed where you’ll have a good view of the door, put a jade plant in your “money area,” hang a bologna sandwich over your toilet to dispel negative energy, etc. But my fellow actress’s enthusiasm implied there might be more worth investigating.

Three chapters into my new used copy of Feng Shui for Dummies, I was hooked—alternately panicked that the “wealth area” of my house’s feng shui octagon is essentially missing, and smugly pleased that the “knowledge area,” where one is supposed to place wood objects, falls in my ’60s-era wood-paneled room. (No wonder my sister, whose office is in the wood-encased knowledge sanctum, has been kicking ass at law school this semester.)

Truly, this book was a treasure trove of new discoveries. Did you know that if your dining room is located in the front half of your house, “visitors may habitually arrive, eat lots of food and then quickly leave”? We can’t have that! Luckily, all you have to do to “cure” this feng shui nightmare is hang a two-inch-diameter faceted crystal sphere over the dining-room table. I suspect finding better friends might also help.

There are also whole sections of the book dedicated to properly angling your bamboo flutes on the wall, and on the importance of “pinwheels, windsocks and whirligigs” in your front lawn if your street is sloped. Some of the issues portrayed as feng shui emergencies struck me as too literal—like the suggestion that, should your garbage disposal break, your household will experience “digestive and excretion problems.”

Ultimately, feng shui is a little like the New Testament. Once you filter out some of the time- and culture-specific particulars and let go of excessively literal interpretations, it boils down to an intuitive universal truth. In the Bible, it’s the Golden Rule; in feng shui, it’s the power of energy flow (chi). With that concept in mind, I feel OK taking a pass on placing a bundle of red fireworks over my front door and using the book mostly as The Secret–meets-interior decorating guide. For instance, the missing wealth area that had me in such a panic apparently can be cured with mirrors and wood, so I procured a gorgeous wood-framed mirror. I pretty much have to buy beautiful new shit, you see, because it’s a self-improvement project. But it’s not enough simply to hang this stuff on the walls—oh no, there are also visualization exercises, mantras and fancy hand gestures designed to invite the improvements you seek into your life.

This is how I found myself pounding nails into the doorway between my bedroom and office and hanging a bamboo beaded curtain from Overstock.com, then closing my eyes, flicking my fingers and chanting om ma ni pad me hum while visualizing abundance in my “relationship sector.” What the book failed to mention was how to get your cats on board with all this “plugging of energy leaks,” not to mention how to get them to refrain from flinging themselves through the curtain like deranged pole-vaulters on meth. Have you ever tried to sleep next to two sets of paws batting at a doorway-size cat toy? The relationship sector is going to have to get pretty spectacular to make up for the damage to my sleep sector.

Naturally, I found out at the very end of the book—long after I had committed to writing this column—that the power of all your “cures” is greatly diminished if you share them with the world. It’s far better to retain their potency by keeping them private. So I may have just ruined all that chanting and flicking and pounding and hanging in one fell swoop.

Oh well. At least I’ve got some beautiful new shit to show for it.

+ Mo Perry's columns appear every month in METRO. To read more of her work, visit her author page.