Recently I was in the neighborhood of an affluent friend of mine, and decided to drop in and say hello.
I found him in his expansive backyard in the company of a tiny and ancient looking Asian man who was conducting what seemed to be a rather ordinary appraisal of the property.
Not so.
I was informed by my friend that Mr. Chin was in fact performing a ritualistic examination of the area using the ancient Chinese principles of ‘Feng Shui.’ Not being entirely familiar with the necessity of my friend employing this technique to ascertain the most desirable spot in his yard for his new patio deck, I asked him what he was hoping to discover.
“Imagine spending a ton of money on the new deck only to find that, had I placed it on a NNW by SSE axis, Molly’s herb garden could never have benefited from the symbolic alignment of the Yin congruence with the Yang in accordance with the current Year of the Rat. Wouldn’t I be the fool?”
Resisting the urge to slap him across the face, I asked how he came to make this unsettling realization in time.
“Oh, Mr. Chin has been a wealth of information; it was his suggestion originally to rip up our old deck, which he said was literally swarming with negative energy.”
It was hard to dispute this, as we were standing in the exact spot where his once delightful, split level patio deck had once stood, and my shoes were now effectively swarming with uncomfortable levels of negatively charged thick, gooey mud.
“How fortunate for you that you caught the disaster in time,” I said, helpfully kicking a friendly pile of mud around his ankles. “Oh yes,” he replied wistfully, “Mr. Chin came very highly recommended.”
Watching Mr. Chin inspect the property with the diligence of a police detective although fascinating, was not emptying my socks of mud, so after a few minutes, I wished my friend well in his spiritual patio endeavor, and lurching my feet out of the mire, made my escape.
A few weeks later, I received an invitation to attend the inaugural celebration of his new patio, and arrived to find an even larger and more luxurious deck supporting a large number of people who were praising it enthusiastically.
After an hour or so I was making my way to the washroom when the doorbell rang. Being the closet person to the front door, I opened it. There was a man holding several enormous take out bags of wonderfully smelling food, obviously catered for the event. It was Mr. Chin, who had clearly found the Feng Shui of his restaurant to be in perfect accordance with the Yin and Yang of my friend’s wallet. He immediately aroused a new found sense of respect from me.
