The answer to Feng-Shui is Toucans.
Mum is getting anxious these days. We had our house re-floored in January, and all the furniture got put back together differently. We've survived the rearrangement for nearly 4 months now, and yesterday Feng-Shui found our house to rescue us from the emotional turmoil of our living room. (You can mystically arrange these kinds of visitations, with simple tools such as corners, wind chimes, straight or pointy fences, and goldfish. Real fish, not crackers.)
We discovered that our gas fireplace (which we do not use) is in its appropriate place - on the South wall, where Fire should be. And we finally returned our mirror-engraved-with-a-lighthouse/shelf/coat hanger to its usual place on the North wall - which belongs to Water, which is eerie because of the ocean lighthouse on the mirror. Our living room is still off-balance, though, and that is why mum is anxious.
We found out that a fish tank placed on our china cabinet in the East would invite "good humor" to our house, as well as a sneaky little thing we like to call "Luck"; and our front porch is not
extremely inviting to evil spirits, because our sidewalk is not quite straight, and we have spirit-evaporating wind chimes in a flower patch by the door.
We also found a refreshingly logical Christian website (with hidden references to C.S. Lewis's idea on the "Life-Force", in
Mere Christianity) explaining, even though we'd already guessed, that Feng-Shui has no place in a Christian home. It denies a personal God in favor of being "at one" with the universe (and its various gods); and that it either has NO real power to invite or dispell good or evil emotion (being a Force of Nature rather than a reasoning entity) - or that it is some kind of god in itself, if it can both "wish" to enter your house, and then leave when it "wills".
Feng-Shui is about peace and harmony; those are good.
Feng-Shui is about orderliness; that's good.
Feng-Shui is about simplicity; good too.
Feng-Shui is about balance; well, that's pretty good.
Feng-Shui is a
religion of balance: so is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Someone suffering from OCD can't help repeating a phrase a certain number of times, or tapping themselves equally on both sides of the body, or avoiding cracks in the sidewalk...this disease, even though it seems (to me) to be all about balance, is actually an imbalance.
Men build Houses and Roads and Parks with rigid attention to balance. Walls are a certain length and the roof peaks at a certain angle. Streets have neat lines in the middle, and opposing lanes of equal width. Parks have cement paths and pruned saplings and all the grass is exactly the same height.
God builds bumblebees that shouldn't be able to fly (but they do). God builds planets that are all lopsided, and "wobble" rather than spin. God builds men with bald heads and people who are not all of them ambidextrous. God builds pelicans with funny throats and birds that don't fly but still have their funny little wings. For crying out loud,
God made toucans.
Yet somehow this wierd, wild universe is perfectly balanced. Every atom is naturally wired to explode, yet it doesn't. Even without the rigid confines of numerical "balancing" and secret hints to keep bad humors out and good humors in, God takes care of us somehow. And the truth sets us free.
