Hey, you even put a pair of lovebirds in the far right corner of your home (the love and marriage part of the bagua) but the love of your life has still not shown up! What’s up with that?

The lovebirds were a good start. But it’s not enough to make a few symbolic shifts in your environment.

Also consider adding some affirmations, clearing the crap out from under the bed, removing the pictures of your ex and tossing the fifty lace pillows (or the dueling pistol set) that would scare away any lover.

Think about losing a few pounds and freshening up your hair style.  And THEN: get out and meet new people.  Moving your stuff will only get you so far – after that you’ve got to put your intentions into action.

But the foundation of feng shui is creating an environment that is safe. So I’m always on the lookout for sharp corners, slippery rugs, heavy things on tall shelve in earthquake country.

But did you know that pets can be a safety hazard?

Our beloved animals may lower our blood pressure but a new report indicates that they also can bring us a world of hurt:

Dogs and cats cause more than 86,000 falls requiring emergency room care each year, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that may be among the first of its kind. That translates into about 240 people who are treated for injuries caused by pets every single day in the United States, the study found.

Cats are involved in some of the falls, but dogs — man’s best friend — are the real culprits, responsible for seven times as many injuries as cats, often while they’re being walked, the report found.

And though more pet-related falls occurred among children and adults in mid-life, elderly people were most likely to break a bone, which can have serious long-term consequences, said Dr. Judy Stevens, the C.D.C. epidemiologist who wrote the report. Women were at more than double the risk for injuries than men.

I certainly can speak to this! I’ve only been to the emergency room once in my life and it was when I tripped over my black standard poodle in the dark and split my lip bigtime on a concrete pillar. Lots of blood, many stitches. No lost teeth, thank god, but I still have the scar.

A few months ago I was walking the same dog and she suddenly cut in front of me (a squirrel!!). I tripped over her leash and slammed into the pavement hitting my chin, hands, elbows, hipbones and knees simultaneously. No hospital trip, but I was crippled for a week and over the next couple of months I became a profit center for my chiropractor.

My sister also has a black standard poodle (it’s a family thing). Last spring she fell over her on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, resulting in her first emergency room visit ever – and a broken collar bone.

Because they seem so silly and mundane, these accidents were never studied until now. And on reflection, it seems so obvious that pets can be hazards… how many times have you heard yourself describe your cat or dog as “always being under foot”?

To make the math easy, let’s assume that each ER visit costs an average of $1,000. That’s $86,000,000 right there. Then we add on followup visits, chiropractor visits, lost work time and we’re talking real money.

Pets need to come with a warning label and glow-in-the-dark jackets.

In various versions of this ancient parable from India, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one touches a different part, but only one part, such as the side, the tail, the leg, the tusk. They then compare notes on what they felt, and learn they are in complete disagreement. We understand then that reality may be viewed differently depending upon one’s perspective, and that what seems an absolute truth may only be partially true.

[I've written about this story and the word "perspective" before - in October as we were getting to know Sarah Palin...]

One of my feng shui clients is a mediator who often deals with warring families. She had one large blank wall in her office for which I had recommended some piece of art that gave her clients a sense of the work they were doing together – perhaps something implying peaceful solutions, the light at the end of the tunnel, problem solving…

She had a better idea. Why not commission a piece of art that illustrated the story of the blind men and the elephant? It would visually convey how it’s possible to “see” a problem from one (limited) point of view, and also recognize that other points of view could be equally legitimate.  She found a skillful quilter, Rosie Rhine, who did a marvelous job telling the story in fabric:

The story of the blind men and the elephant is extremely flexible. A few months ago New Yorker cartoonist Tom Cheney used it to depict the sorry state of our economy, perhaps from the points of view of different economists, political players or suffering citizens:

Persnickety: adj. fussy about small details

People can be very persnickety about their pillows. As well they should be.  Pillows can make or break a good night’s sleep.  I’m often shocked, when I do a feng shui consultation, by how many people hate their mattresses or their pillows….

Hello???

Pillow choices are very personal. Some like them plump and turgid – and even prefer to prop themselves on more than one at a time. Most hotel rooms and relative’s guest rooms seem equipped with these:

You can try to pummel them into submission, but they bounce right back.

Then there’s the memory foam pillow that remembers how big your left ear is:

And the special cervical pillow to keep your neck properly angled:

And pillows made of gel, filled with water, five feet long to snuggle with lengthwise…. you name it, there’s a pillow for you.

I prefer a pillow that is totally malleable: I punch it and scrunch it into a wadge to support my head when I lie on my side; press it down to a slender edge when I want to sleep on my stomach; or roll it into a sausage under my neck if I want to gaze up at the ceiling:

But Friday when I was at the Asian Art museum in San Francisco I saw the be-all and end-all pillow. From the Song dynasty about a thousand years ago, it’s made of porcelain. The descriptive placard said that once you get used to it, it’s really very comfortable.  Sure.

Power: n. the ability to act or produce an effect

Passé: adj. out-moded, past its prime

James Kunstler says it’s time to pucker our purses. Put down those precious pearls. Hands off the purple Prada pocketbook. And for god’s sake don’t purchase more plastic.

Say goodbye to the “consumer society.” We’re done with that. No more fast money and no more credit. The next stop is “yard-sale nation,” in which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to Hello Kitty charm bracelets.

It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves as “consumers.” This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101 section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a republic of broken communities shattered by Wal-Marts.

Kunstler is right. It’s high time we the people were called “people” or “citizens” instead of “consumers”.  The first step in changing our behavior is changing our thinking and language. I’d much rather be known as a citizen, which implies an awareness of and participation in the society around me.

We do have lives beyond the shopping mall, don’t we??  Lives of meaning even: we’re parents, children, workers, savers, helpers, voters…

Time to reclaim our humanity.

I had used PowerPoint before, but mainly to prompt myself. Then I read  Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen, which is an absolute MUST resource for any would-be presenters.

First, out went any slides with bullet points. Then out went slides with more than a few words, unless it was a succinct quotation. That left me with….

Almost nothing.

I started over. Instead of using bullet points I used before and after pictures from my work with clients plus images from Google and Flickr.  Here are a few examples of images I found from Flickr:

To illustrate what a feng shui consultant does when she/he comes to your house – conveying both the fresh eyes which can see your home more clearly AND addressing the fear many potential clients have that she’ll be some sort of critical witch:

Or these three slides, which illustrate the dilemma of clutter. First the extreme possibility that you could be buried alive by it:

Then, the inertia we feel when viewing the clutter-clearing task ahead:

Then we talked about the power of momentum… what happens once you get started tossing crap:

I’d say it took a solid 40 hours to put together 150 slides for a two-hour talk, and a lot of creative thought while I was half-asleep. But it was totally worth it because the people in the class could SEE for themselves what made a room work (or not).

Poor: adj. impoverished, beseiged

Paul Krugman (Nobel prize-winning economist, Princeton professer, and liberal NY Times pundit) spoke to a packed house in Portland the other night as the first in our annual World Affairs Speakers Series.

The theme for this year’s series was supposed to be “The World in 2020″ but Krugman rightly assumed that his audience was much more concerned about what was happening in the world in 2009, so he talked about the economic crisis.

He was funny*. And pessimistic. His basic message was that it sucks out there, everywhere – and that we have a right to be worried because we’ve never been in quite this sort of pickle. And furthermore, it’s a global crisis.

We poor consumers who have already lost jobs, health insurance, and homes  aren’t stupid. We tighten our belts, hunker down and dust off grandma’s formerly quaint advice on cooking dry beans and saving string.

But thanks to the “paradox of thrift”, our sudden crave to save is making the economy spiral down faster. If we don’t buy stuff, companies don’t earn enough money to make stuff, so they lay off workers – or they drop their prices to woo buyers, causing their competitors to do so as well which also leads to stuck inventories and laid off workers.

Giving us a tax credit or tax cut may put a few bucks in our pockets, Krugman says, but we use that to pay down debt, which doesn’t help the economy. We should be spending…

(Didn’t we just try that?? like for the past couple of decades?)

If he were to advise Obama he’d tell him to make the stimulus package big enough… like about $2 trillion (!) because that’s what’s needed to get people working again so we can return to our spending ways. Unfortunately a ginormous stimulus package is a hard political sell.

Meanwhile, all the money I’ve saved from eating dog kibble the past few weeks just flew into my dentist’s pocket. It appears that kibble chomping can crack a tooth.

* Sample Krugman joke: “Capitalism is a system of exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the reverse.”

This is something Bush wouldn’t stand for – it was suits and ties always, or you got seriously chewed out.

The new pres seems more concerned with getting things done than protocol or decor. So far he hasn’t changed the Oval Office furnishings, except yesterday he mentioned that W’s commemorative plate collection was going to have to go.

“I’m not a plates kind of guy,” he said.

Is anyone surprised? Commemorative plates are so last year; actually they’re so last generation (or even Grandma’s generation).

Are you still hanging on to Grandma’s plates, even though you’re “Not a plates kind of person”?   Do like Obama; let go of the stuff from other people’s lives so you can live your own life.

“When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.”
-Chinese proverb

On my walk this morning I found a penny on the sidewalk.

It is a tradition in my family to give the coin to whoever you’re with, and tell them, “Keep this as a harbinger of wealth to come.”  Many many pennies have passed through my hands in this way, and it always pleases me to turn it over to the person I’m with – like an unexpected blessing.

Today it was just me and my poodle.  Although Molly is an omnivore and has been known to eat napkins, plastic bags, and unspeakable dead things, she’s not into coins. So I kept it and added it to my jar of coins found solo.

Interestingly, 95% of my found coins are pennies. The dropper evidently figures it’s not worth stooping to pick up something so lowly – or maybe other passers-by only stoop for nickels, dimes and quarters, and leave the pennies for me.

(Twice over the years my walking partner and I  stumbled on a ten dollar bill. Both times we took it as a sign we should toss whatever plan we had for the morning out the window and go out for lunch.)

When I was young, my mom used to pay us kids for digging dandelions from the lawn at a penny apiece.  And back then a penny actually bought something – candy, a gumball or a card with your fortune on it.  Now that it’s worth so little (less than the metal it’s made of?) the US Treasury Dept thinks from time to time about abolishing it entirely, but we’re not yet ready to see it go.

I know I still look at the found penny as a harbinger of blessings to come.

Path: n. a way of life, conduct or thought

I gave up making New Year’s resolutions a long time ago, because they were inevitably doomed to failure. (Research bears me out…). Instead I’ve picked a THEME for the year – a word or phrase that indicates a path, focus, attitude, or way of being to attend to.

The first time I tried to choose a theme I had about five disparate ideas.  I was chewing over these on a walk with my best friend that New Year’s morning. She listened to me prattle on for awhile and then she said, she had a better one: “FOCUS!”

Of course she was right – focus has been an issue for me since I was a kid. I’m not ADHD, but my interests and passions are all over the map. Jill of all trades, mistress of none… So Focus it was – for two years, because it took that long to simplify my life enough to do so.

Last year was  “Completion.”  I’m embarassed to say that I’d forgtten completely about that theme until I just read it in my journal entry for New Year’s Day 2008. Obviously I never figured out how to keep the idea in front of me!

Several of my friends also choose annual themes, so they have been kind enough to share their themes, in case I wanted to borrow one:

• “Think Big” – VaNessa
• “Engage!” – Heather
• “Generous and open-hearted” – Peter
• “Make it happen!” – VaNessa
• “Patience and understanding” – Mary
• “Now is the time!” – Jack

I love some of these, but “Now is the Time!” really resonated with me and I’m going to run with it – for several reasons:

• The energy cost of dithering on decisions (as minor as to whether to keep or toss a piece of paper, or as major as just FILING the damned divorce papers and being done with it.)
• The acknowledgment that the present moment is all there is and I want to be present for it
• The recognition that time is precious

The question is: How will I keep this mantra up front in my brain several times a day for a year?  What will be an effective trigger to jog my mind?

Jonathan Mead, guest poster on Zen Habits offers these suggestions:

• If you want to help yourself get in a creative state, you can setup an environmental trigger. Maybe that means sitting in a certain chair (putting on your thinking cap, as it were). Or it could be triggered by a change in your breathing (slower or more rapid breathing).
• To get excited about exercise, you might setup a trigger by moving a certain way or doing a visualization. You could make your trigger swinging your arms back and forth and visualize yourself in front of mirror with your ideal body. Use something that gets you pumped up. MMA fighters and boxers do this all the time by slapping their chests or face. Not recommended, but you get the idea.
• In order to put yourself in a state of confidence, you could create triggers in your posture. Sitting straight and stretching my arms above my head always makes me feel more confident.
• To trigger yourself into a state of focus, you can touch your eyes or massage your temples.
• Putting your hand on your heart is a great idea for cultivating an open mind and preparing yourself to really listen to someone.

These are just a few ideas; you can make up your own triggers. They can also be environmental, like engineering the attentional feng shui of your room. Take a look at your space and see what kind of triggers it sets off in you. Are they reinforcing your passions and your goals?

My current idea is to write NOW IS THE TIME right after the day’s date, when I sit down to journal. And whenever I write the date on a check or a time on my calendar, to use that as the trigger to say out loud, with conviction: NOW IS THE TIME!  Hopefully that will remind me to breathe deeply and ask myself, “what’s happening right now?” and “what should be happening right now?”

Yoga class is another place to use this trigger. It also wouldn’t hurt to review a chapter of one of Eckhart Tolle’s books – the Power of Now, or A New Earth.

I’m noting NOW IS THE TIME on my calendar for the 1st of the next 11 months right now.