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I give very thorough advice in my books, lectures and consultations, but I encounter new feng shui problems all the time. Here, I’ll be sharing new solutions I come across and answering questions you might have.
If you have a question that you can’t find the answer to (please use the search box at the bottom of this page to see if I’ve covered the subject before), leave a comment here and I’ll consider writing a future blog post about it.
Beautiful, natural light through sheer curtains. Photo by Orlova Maria on Unsplash
Feng shui is a natural art—taking nature as the guide. Therefore, colored lighting of any kind is cautioned against in feng shui. Colored light bulbs are to be avoided inside homes. This includes strings of small lights—if those lights are colored. Christmas is an exception to that—but keep the use of colored lights to less than one month. For indoor strings of Christmas lights (or any colored lights for special events, such as parties) try to let their use be for a maximum of three weeks at a time. Clear strings of lights can be used anytime, year round. Don’t ever use blinking lights in homes. Blinking lights are too yang for homes and should only be used (carefully) in retail stores.
During the day, colored sheer curtains can tint the light coming into a room. If the sheers are going to be drawn together covering the window during the daylight, use white sheers, not colored sheers. Only use colored sheers if they are going to be open during the day. At that point, I figure, why bother—just use white sheers in the first place.
Remember that we are talking about using natural things: Use natural-colored lighting, and curtains made of natural fibers. They are commonly available, but don’t use sheers made of synthetic fabric. The fabric is delicate and hung in the window, light can slowly destroy it. Meanwhile, tiny pieces of plastic (POPs) are drifting off into the air you’re breathing…
Image by Claudio_Scott from Pixabay
You can greatly enrich your experience of life by learning from your dreams. To learn from your dreams, you first have to remember them when you are awake. While you are trying to remember a dream, don’t change your position from the one you were in while you were having the dream. If you switch to a different bodily position, you’ll almost always lose some of you memories of that dream. As soon as you start to wake up, remind youself not to change physical positions. If you need to grab a handy notepad or audio recorder (a cell phone, these days) then do so, but quickly come back to the position you were in while sleeping, and then start taking notes of your memories in as much detail as you can possibly remember.
Poison arrows can be unintentionally aimed right at us due to the way we position our furniture.
To really learn from your dreams, start with a really good dream “dictionary”. The best one I know of is contained within a book with a very simple title: The Dream Book by Betty Bethards. She stresses the importance of remembering the details. Did you turn right or left? Were you going uphill or downhill? Remembering details such as that are crucial to understanding the meaning of a dream.
Also, avoid poison arrows aimed at your body while you are in bed. (This video of one of my furniture store talks discusses that exact issue at about the 1-minute point.) That should be common sense, and I will personally testify that poison arrows can cause severely disturbed sleep. I love vintage furniture and recommend it because it rarely has poison arrows.
I just got this great book from the library—Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer—but even a great book can’t keep me awake in a hammock. (Note the fragrant Angel’s Trumpet blooming outside.)
We usually think of hammocks as outdoor furniture, but I’ve often recommended that clients put a hammock in a large unused room. Unused rooms are too yin for a home, and the correction is simply to use that room. Once a hammock is in a room, it will most likely be used. The hammock can be held by a freestanding frame, or it can be stretched between two hooks. The advantage of the hammock between two hooks is that it can quickly and easily be put away.
We keep a hammock in our bedroom, and it mostly hangs in a corner, and occasionally gets unfurled for taking a nap or reading a book. I’m one of those people who needs a pillow for a hammock to feel most comfortable. What anyone should avoid are hammocks with stretcher bars—those kinds of hammocks can easily tip over and out you go.
The gentle rocking of a hammock is very relaxing. Soon I put my book down and start napping.
What brings this to mind is a photo in a back issue of Architectural Digest (the November 2017 issue; I don’t have permission to post the photo here, but if you follow that link, you can see it)—which shows a hammock in a living room! The article is about the midcentury designer Ward Bennett and a book about him by the same name. The room is plenty big and it looks out onto a lovely view. The same thing applies to hanging chairs, but be sure you hang them securely. A molly bolt in sheet rock ain’t gonna do it!
The idea for this article came from reading a charming little book, My Ideal Bookshelf, edited by Thessaly La Force and illustrated by Jane Mount. I first came across the book in the Huntsville, Alabama, main library when I was back there for a few months helping my dear old mother move out of independent living. For the book, about a hundred people were asked to “select a small shelf of books that represent you—the books that have changed your life, that have made you who you are today, your favorite favorites.” The very last page of the book (on what’s called the pastedown) is an invitation to readers to send in their own “ideal bookshelf.” At the time, I thought I might do that when I got back home—but, of course, I had lots of catch-up kind of things to do when I got home, so I never did it. Then I picked up a copy of the book at Big Island BookBuyers in Hilo the last time I was over there, and it got me to thinking about it again. And not long ago I wrote an article for this blog called “What I’m Reading Now,” and some of the feedback I got was from old friends who were grateful for certain books I’d recommended to them in the past. (As someone who has owned three bookstores, I’ve recommended a lot of books!)
So here are six books that meant the most to me as I was developing into an independent adult.
The bookend is my favorite, an old McCoy Lilybud in a soft matte white. The books with titles to be read upright are upright. The books with titles to be read horizontally are horizontal.
My girlfriend at Huntsville High School, Cathy Earnest, told me that her Uncle Danny, whom she rightly adored, had recommended The Crock of Gold by James Stephens. Stephens was part of the Irish Renaissance, a period of writing that produced James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and others. Luckily the Huntsville Library had a copy and even more luckily it was a hardback with all the original color illustrations. Don’t even think of reading a paperback copy of this marvelous book. The illustrations by Thomas Mackenzie are as important as the writing. I realize I’ve told you next to nothing about the book, except read it.
I’d started reading Alan Watts while I was in high school, and one of his books that influenced me the most was The Joyous Cosmology which describes his use of hallucinogenic drugs. It led to the fateful day when Cathy and I went off in the woods on Huntsville Mountain and spent the next several hours “watching the glories roll by” as Neil Young would say, or “changing our minds” as Michael Pollan says. On the way home, Cathy said that she wanted her mother to try it. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea to even tell her mother, but I appreciated her sentiment.
That night I picked up the book Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon (which had been patiently waiting on my bookshelf, as books do) and read the Preface. I realized that the book was going to mean so much to me that I’d better read it with a dictionary. It had a lot of words I didn’t know, and I wanted to get everything out of the book that the author put in. (Ignore the fact that Dover Publications bound the book together with his earlier book, Last and First Men. Starmaker is the one to read!) It took my conception of how big the universe could be and reduced it to the size of a grain of sand—and gave me a much bigger conception of the universe.
The book that pointed me away from psychedelics and toward sitting in meditation was Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. It was so important to me that it was in the very first section as soon as you walked in the door of my first bookstore (A Good Book Store, opened when I was 19). In the very next section was Selling Water by the River by Jiyu Kennett, the woman who would eventually ordain me a Zen monk. The beating heart of the entire book is a short section describing how to do pure meditation, and the jist of it all is in these words, “…neither trying to think nor trying not to think. Just sitting with no deliberate thought is the important aspect of Zazen.” (Oddly and frustratingly, the most recent edition of the book completely leaves out this section.)
When I first went to Shasta Abbey in 1976 (and became ordained as a lay Buddhist) the person who ordained me recommended And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. Lusseyran went blind early in his life and never took it negatively. He tells his amazing story which includes working with the French Resistance in WW2, and being captured and put in a concentration camp. That was one of the biggest lessons in my life, that whatever happened to me, I should take it positively—and thereby get the gift of that moment.
Those are my “ideal bookshelf” titles. I would love to hear about yours.
This isn’t from Architectural Digest, but it illustrates the “opposing couches” problem I mention at the end of this post. Couches across from each other say “opposing viewpoints,” but you can fix that problem with a crystal between them. (Image by Pexels from Pixabay)
This is what happens when you’ve got as many back issues as I’ve still got—but the pile is rapidly dwindling. Let’s start with some silly things, such as this ad I’m looking at for a closet design. There’s what looks to be a big round skylight in the center of the giant closet, and hopefully everyone knows that direct sunlight is going to fade clothes badly, especially anything red (red being the weakest pigment). In the center of the closet is a giant square hassock with a couch scarf casually draped over it. Now a couch scarf on a couch makes sense—the house is a little chilly and instead of turning the heat up, you pull a couch scarf over or around you. But on a hassock in a closet—it looks super weird! Somebody’s just trying to sell couch scarves—as if they were appropriate anywhere—what’s next—couch scarves on breakfast bars?
Another silly thing—somebody’s Arizona house has got a Stark brand carpet on the floor of the billiard room. That sounds all nice and fine—until you look for more than one second, and you realize that the carpet was probably rolled out minutes before the photographer took the picture. All the lines of it being rolled up are still very plain on the carpet. I’m very surprised they printed that picture! You could practically trip on the roll wrinkles. The lesson here (as far as I’m concerned) is that every rug or carpet needs a pad under it. A pad (and five minutes of walking) would have taken all those roll wrinkles out. The most amazing thing about rug pads is that they add hundreds of years to the life of the rug!
The same issue (January 2015) has a great example of good design and good feng shui. There’s a long darkish hall in a “minimalist” NYC apartment. (I put minimalist in quotes because it’s the busiest minimalist space I’ve ever seen—stuff on top of stuff, stuff in front of stuff.) But in the hall, there’s one entire long wall that’s been lacquered to create a mirror effect. The long wall opposite the mirror has eighteen vintage Charlotte Perriand light sconces, and the effect couldn’t be better. That long hall seems spacious and magical!
Let’s go on to a couple more silly things before we end on a positive note. They’re both ads—the first one is for a lounge chair called Lockheed Lounge designed by Marc Newson for a company called Phillips. It’s made up of little pieces of riveted metal—that’s right—the whole chair, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that looked more uncomfortable. Remember my phrase? More dollars than sense! And that same phrase applies to an ad for an orange sofa by Michael Amini. It’s a lovely sofa, but one of the throw pillows (that’s designed to go with it) has a great big AM embroidered on it. I know where I’d throw that pillow!
That same issue (May 2015) has an article with another piece designed by Charlotte Perriand—a lovely round, black coffee table—placed in the center between two huge half-circle white couches in a London penthouse. When I showed it to my husband, he asked if they had the problem of “a couch directly facing another couch” (which says “opposite points of view—arguments”). I replied, “Yes, it sure does, but wouldn’t a large crystal look great on that table?” And that would be the solution—the crystal symbolizes “dispersing the opposing energy”. (See page 94 & 95 of Feng Shui for Hawaii for more on this topic.)
