Chinese Feng Shui is the art of deciphering whether the site and layout of a particular building is fortuitous or not. It is a traditional system that has been around for a thousand years. It also has a metric ton of rules that one must memorize, many of which have more to do with the layout and climate of the average medieval Chinese town than with anything else. If you don’t feel ready to learn all the traditional Feng Shui rules, you can use an abbreviated European pagan version that Raven refers to as “Not Feng Shui”. Just bring a compass and look at the four directions.

Rooms in the eastern part of the dwelling would theoretically be good for starting to face the day, facing morning, and so. Having a bedroom there would be great if you were trying to train yourself to get up early; not so good if you work third shift. Kitchens and breakfast nooks - anywhere you eat the first meal of the day - would be most fortuitous if located in the east, as would study areas because of the east’s association with the mind. Even if a study area is located in another part of the house, placing the desk so that it faces east would help with focus and thought.

Rooms in the southern area would give the most energy - again, possibly not the best place for a bedroom, unless your sex life is sluggish and you want to wake it up. Spending time in a southern room might keep you up late nights - Raven’s computer room is on the southern exposure, and it’s where he spends most of his three p.m. awake time. It’s also a good place for an exercise room, or dance floor, or the sort of nook with couches piled high with big fluffy cushions...you know, the kind of place that couples go to have private time. The southern exposure makes a good space for doing art or music or writing or other creative endeavors. It’s probably also a good place for a home business, as it would keep people motivated, especially toward the southeast corner. However, if you are arguing with someone, make sure to move out of the southern end of the house so as to calm the argument down. (The north would help move the discussion towards practical resolution, the east would aid in objectivity, and the west would help with compassion.)

The west would be the best place for a bedroom, with its association with romance and emotional peace, and also bathrooms. One would assume that there might be less plumbing problems and general trouble with the water spirits in a western room. Anyone who does healing regularly with clients should situate their office in the western part of the building. The perfect and ideal place for a kitchen would be in the southwest corner, with its association with both fire and water - the cauldron cooking on the stove.

The north would be a good place for family gathering, late-day meals, possibly the kitchen, rooms for winding down in the evening, and any workshops where handcrafts are done or things are made by hand. It’s a good place for storerooms, where resources are held in common and stored. IT could also work well as an office or computer room, if the work done there was not so much creative as practical, even monotonous. Bedrooms in the northern part of the house would be conducive to sound sleeping.

However, even if every room in the house is in the wrong place, you can still manage, by calling traces of the more appropriate elements into it. Bedroom in the south and you’d rather it was in the west? Bring water into the room with a fishtank, or sea-colored curtains over the bright southern-exposure windows. Keep getting distracted in your western kitchen and want more grounded earth energy in it? Paint the walls green, or bring in plants along the western wall. Changing the color of the decor is a good way to bring the energy of another element into the place, as is putting up wall art that reflects that spirit.

If a particular room feels cramped to you, because of small size or odd shape, and the energy can’t pass around it freely, hang mirrors in the wall that you wish was expanded outward, and it will increase the energy flow. It’s another way to psychically expand a part of the house that is small, and whose energy you miss.

Another issue when choosing a home is that of ley lines. These are the lines of energy that run under and through the ground everywhere. They’re even present in the city; urban development does not eliminate them, although concrete does muffle them and they are better felt underground. (See chapter on Underground.) Ley lines can be as thin as a garden hose or as wide as a road. They come in two varieties, positive and negative. This doesn’t mean good or bad; more like A/C and D/C, or yin and yang. Positive ley lines give off energy and aren’t good to have running directly under your bedroom. Negative ley lines absorb energy and aren’t good to have under any room except your bathroom. Underground water generally follows negative ley lines, and water likes that energy and will carry any excess away with it. A ley cross, or the place where two ley lines cross over each other, is extra-strength voltage. A negative ley cross would be great to build a compost heap on, but not so good to live on. A positive ley cross can feel good for a while, but give you headaches after long-term exposure. A ley cross composed of one positive and one negative line would be great for a place of power to do magic work, and is the only one even remotely safe to live over. Ideally, your home should be situated in the blank space between major ley lines, not on top of them.

The other problem is that the energy of ley lines can be intensified by severe landscaping, like the kind contractors do that involves leveling hills and filling in small valleys with heavy equipment. Normally, ley lines are underground, and you feel the energy vibrating up from them, but if the earth is cut away to the point where the raw center of a ley line is exposed - and worse still, a house is then put on top of it - it can cause illness in the people living on and around it. This is most likely to be a problem in new housing developments where there has been recent massive digging just before home erection. If you check out one of these and feel vaguely uncomfortable, nauseous, or headachey just from walking around it, an exposed ley line might be the culprit. Don’t move in.

Dowsing for ley lines could be a book in itself, so we won’t go into it in detail here. However, if you don’t have a knack for it (and I don’t) or don’t want to learn it, there are professional dowsers about who will gladly trot their Y-rods out and check a site for you, and they will know what you’re talking about when you ask them to check for ley lines. The National Association of Dowsers has their home site in St. Johnsbury, VT.