Clutter or chi, feng shui magic is welcome here

I used to shrug off all this feng shui business as just another silly New Age energy fad embraced by Southern Californians who seem to spend far too much time in the sun.

But in the last couple of years or so, there’s been so much spoken and written about feng shui that the practice appears to have successfully emerged from the shadows of ancient Chinese mysticism and is taking root in mainstream American culture.

For the unenlightened, feng shui (pronounced fung shway) derives from the belief that an invisible energy force called chi radiates throughout the universe. Objects that are improperly placed in the environment – furniture, windows, doors, entire buildings, you name it – can trap chi or block its beneficial flow. This is said to produce an undesirable, disharmonious atmosphere that impairs people’s ability to reap the riches of life. Depending on what you read about the practice, feng shui is either the Chinese for “wind water” or “gullible Westerner.”

The home-decorating, gardening and health-and-fitness magazines regularly carry articles espousing the restorative powers of feng shui. There are a ton of feng shui books on the market, too, all of them promising to bring harmony, fortune and radiant health to anyone who taps into the unseen energy forces of nature by rearranging the furniture at home or at work according to the time-honored principles.

For a fee, you can even bring a feng shui consultant to your home or office to align the essential “movement/static and Yin/Yang” balances that may be seriously off kilter from the bedroom to the boardroom.

From a book called “Clean Your Clutter with Feng Shui,” I learned that common household clutter is more than just an unsightly mess. It is actually “stuck energy that has far-reaching effects physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.” An accompanying jacket blurb gushes that this handy book “elevates cleaning clutter from a mundane task to an experience of a lifetime,” which sounds like the theme of a Sunday afternoon TV show co-hosted by Martha Stewart and the Dalai Lama.

As further proof that feng shui is being accepted by the masses, check out “The Idiot’s Guide to Feng Shui,” and “Feng Shui for Dummies.”

Not long ago, in fact, I listened to a born-and-bred Down East woman talk excitedly about how she planned to arrange her living room around some wooden shelving units she had just bought at Marden’s.

“You know, make it feng shui,” she told me. She didn’t wink and she didn’t laugh, either. She was serious about this feng shui stuff, which presumably is capable of working its magic even through smoke-scented wood from your local salvage store.

The people of Sausalito, Calif., are so serious about this, in fact, that last month they scrapped a proposal for a $7.8 million municipal building when a feng shui consultant determined that the structure would turn out to be one, big chi-clogging nightmare.

I don’t mean to make fun of those people who have an unquestioning belief in feng shui – well, maybe just a little. I would rather try to keep an open mind about such things, even though I tend to be a bit suspicious of a universal life force that can be so easily trapped in a pile of dirty laundry or stopped dead in its tracks by a poorly placed sectional sofa.

Besides, who am I to question the plausibility of the ancient Chinese arts? I’ve met Mainers who swear that certain people have the power to find water deep in the ground by walking around a field with a Y-shaped stick. We don’t call them charlatans; we call them dowsers.

If there is, in fact, an invisible life force called chi coursing through the world, I want to imbibe all I can get. The sad truth is, a feng shui master could make a killing in my house, especially if he charged by the hour. There is energy stuck in just about every corner of the old place. It’s on top of the dressers, under the beds and mounded all over the bathroom floor. And that does not take into account the attic or the garage, which are jammed so full of pent-up chi clutter that you can hardly walk through those places without tripping on something or banging your shin.

How nice it would be to simply hire one of these experts to come over sometime and give my house a feng shui makeover. With a little mystical furniture rearrangement, a few light-reflective crystals and mirrors placed in just the right spots, and maybe a china bowl of sea salt set on the windowsill to soak up the negativity, a metaphysical Roto-Rooter man might be able to unclog the old chi pipes and get the life force running free until it was zinging off the walls.

And even if the feng shui treatment didn’t make my family any more harmonious, prosperous or radiantly healthy than it was before, at least we’d get a good spring cleaning out of the deal.

I’d do it myself, but I just can’t seem to find the energy.

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.