By Kimberly Maben
Buffalo, NY – I admit it. I'm a feng shui junkie. For the past 30 years--in fact, since high school, when I first came across the word in a mail order catalog and thought it was the most exotic sound I'd ever heard and knew that no one on the small street in South Buffalo where I'd been stuck for most of my uneventful life would even know what it meant--I have been hooked.
After all, I come from a long line of intuitive decorators-as they're called today. When I was a child, my mother used to move our furniture so frequently that my father often tripped over the davenport, set in strange, new locations at odd, unexpected angles night after night as he navigated our living room in the dark after returning home when the closing bell rang on the third shift at Ford Stamping Plant on the outskirts of Buffalo. The location of his workplace, he must have felt, was the only thing he knew for sure.
And then there was my grandmother, Lelia, born and bred in Bradford, a small point on the Pennsylvania map. As all the other women there were discovering the joys of crisp cotton bedding from the local Montgomery Ward and JC Penney stores, she instead insisted on sumptuous 100 percent imitation silks and the weight of brocade by mail order to swath her bedroom in-from draperies to comforters, fabrics so dense that her small frame barely had a chance to leave its imprint on the mattress. The only other person allowed to sleep in this dark forest of fabric was Grandpa. To the rest of us, the door was always closed on the world of her Charisma cologne and his cedar-lined closets.
But, as I later learned in my years of solo study, those were some of the lessons that feng shui meant to teach me: bedrooms are a haven for a couple's love to rest in and the living room is often the refuge for families to return to after navigating through this dimly-lit world.
It's in my present life as a writer trying to settle into a new living space and create a home office, however, that I'm struggling with how feng shui can help. Drawing down volumes of my guidebooks from the bookshelf each Sunday, as holy a ritual as a puritan's prayers, I religiously seek answers that, once found, could guide me to write easily, publish quickly and solve financial worries forever. The questions are easy enough. It's the answers that seem to require as much time to find as my writing does to do. Why aren't there Cliff Notes for this? I wonder.
Depending on which book you have, the practice of feng shui is rooted in Chinese traditions borne some 3,000 to 6,000 years ago. Translated as "wind" (feng) and "water" (shui), the term is used today to define a body of study devoted to optimizing the inherent energy (known as "chi") where you work and live in order to obtain maximum benefits. Simply put, by enhancing and balancing a room's energy, you can improve your health, wealth, reputation, creativity, relationships, career, knowledge and even connections with helpful people.
As with feng shui, writing and life, the more you learn, the less you know. What feng shui still teaches me is to apply what little I know, learn more and keep writing in the meantime. After three decades of study, much introspection and many awe-inspiring moments, I still believe in feng shui. I believe in its logic. I believe that we should focus, sometimes, on certain aspects of our lives. But mostly, I believe like my mother and grandmother did, that your surroundings can influence your outcome. They struggled in their small worlds using imagination and intuition. In my arsenal, I add a science borne 3,000 to 6,000 years ago-depending on which book you have.
It's true - feng shui holds no magic answer per se. But it's in the search--as my father might have suspected while navigating his way anew each night through our living room labyrinth-that with some sustained effort I may eventually arrive home.
Listener-Commentator Kimberly Maben is a native Buffalonian who is currently communications manager at the Bradford Regional Medical Center.