I FIRST “learned” about Feng Shui from a Kris Aquino-starrer, from a typical shocker flick awash with slamming of doors, the movie’s baby-powdered version of The Grim Reaper and the lead’s signature histrionics.
For my 10-year-old-or-thereabouts self it was one part encapsulating the whole concept of Feng Shui in a nutshell of fortune and death, and two parts an admonition that I should never, ever, look into a bagua.
For the sum of its parts, while some of those who looked into the bagua in the movie prospered on a windfall, others who did died from what was rather to me a “natural death” because, although they were murdered by circumstance, they were killed in a way ridiculously related to their zodiac signs. Either that some Rooster person got stabbed in a cockpit or some disturbingly depressed Rat ingested a copious amount of rat killer.
I surmise that if that titular Feng Shui movie were made only later and just recently, the screenwriters would have been more realistic and made sense of a Rat person’s death by drinking coffee, realizing only later that there’s rat in it. Of course, the girl character would not die from toxicity, but rather it would be such that the writers would make the girl a bitch and a social climber, and the rat in the coffee would be some man-made contrivance to ruin her day.
If my brother, Vien, wasn’t so bothered by it or maybe just too young to understand, I looked it up in the calendar and figured I am a Rooster, and the possibility of being fried or hearing the word “lava” made me fear for my life. So there was no watching-my-mother-cook days but if I did, I was on the other side of the threshold. If it was destined to be inevitable, once I got splattered with globs of cooking oil and it caused the skin on my arm to rise into blisters. “Mama, I’m going to die,” I cried, while my mother was cleaning me up, and egged her on to check if the baby-powdered Chinese Grim Reaper would materialize in the doorstep. “I knew it, I swear I’m going to die.”
It was only later that I really learned what Feng Shui is all about, and I didn’t mean fortune-telling, nor some imminent death forecast. It is to acknowledge that the Earth is full of energy and Feng Shui is to figure how this energy ever present, ever influential, ad infinitum will work in your favor. When I was first hit on, I consulted an expert, who, after checking my birth chart (year of birth, month, day and time), concluded that this year I’ll be lucky. She advised that I pursue the things I had been perpetually in pursuit of but didn’t successfully acquire, and be extra aggressive because, this time, the pursuit is not going to be an uphill battle.
To Feng Shui my home she instructed me to, given where my bedroom is as a point of reference, put a Tray of Harmony northwest beside our house’s main door, where the conflict star is. It was then that my attention drifted and it occurred to me how much charms and lucky items there were in the shop, each, I surmise, was Feng Shui-ed and purposefully placed based on calculations.
“Just how much luck is this place able to lure in? Or may I stay here forever for good luck?” I thought, this as I touched a talisman-like elephant and pulled my hand away, scared of a woman who cast an evil eye the way you might when the consequences of someone’s misbehavior might result in a major imbalance in that space, the sort that causes ships to capsize and airplanes to lose altitude.
The expert went on, this time describing the diametrical difference between luck and freewill. “Freewill is to choosing a path, but luck is how probably the reason we have a finite calendar, so that there’s always a beginning to anticipate and we can start all over again. smooth that path is going to be,” she said. I don’t know about that. I used to think that luck is what Thomas Jefferson once equated to hard work, while free will is what the psychiatrist Herman Melville wrote as the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. But, here, I learned that luck is something innate to a person, that you can’t alter your vulnerabilities because you can’t change your birth chart, that it’s a fact that the world is full of dog poop, but you definitely could be forewarned so that you won’t step on it.
Some of the measures, regardless of who you are and what your birth chart says about it, to attract good luck would rather strike you as common sense, such as wearing new clothes and a new hairstyle, not scolding your children on the first day of the year, settling your debts so that it won’t carry over the succeeding year.
It’s a culture obsessed with symbols, one that is inextricably hinged on beginnings as a great life motivator. That’s probably the reason we have a finite calendar, so that there’s always a beginning to anticipate and we can start all over again. From where I’m coming we welcome the January 1 New Year with what others think as rather already passé practices like wearing clothes with polka dots and putting round fruits on the table. One should not have a long face while ushering a fresh start, lest luck will not be on your side and you’ll be sad for the rest of your life.
Either you get motivated by having conformed to these customs or you take it as a nagging reminder because there are a lot of things we just tend to forget. Or maybe we do these things in fear that, if we don’t, bad things might happen to us. In other words it is maybe a responsibility associated with OCD. I remember asking my mom years ago about the effectiveness of the talisman she wore as a protection bracelet. She said effective or not, you consult the Feng Shui for signs and directions because the future is uncertain and we want something to hold on to.
