Looking at these pictures—taken of our Wagen just after Baby Pickles was born (i.e. almost exactly one year ago)—has led my brain into a feng shui ramble.  I’ve always hated that word.  Poor word.  It isn’t feng shui’s fault that I associate the term with the flakiest of the flaky hippies.

But at the same time I am hardcore into…shudder…feng shui myself, though it is not the feng shui of the books we sold at Waldenbooks (I read two).  That feng shui has very specific instructions: a couch facing west will get you more money, a window to the east will help creativity, etc, etc.  Ridiculous.  Utterly ridiculous.  Real feng shui—not as any guru has ever described it (though one might have) but in the way I that I experience and define it for myself—would need to be determined specifically for your dwelling and its relation to the world.  I feel very intensely about how I arrange things in my living space.  I can never explain it, but there is always a place for everything that can make a room feel right.  When something is in the wrong place—and I don’t mean just a shirt somebody didn’t put away, but the placement of furniture and permanent decorations—the whole room feels wrong.  Like that cut on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop quoting Fight Club.

The interesting thing is that there isn’t just one order that can make a room feel right, and every couple of months or years something shifts, and I need to rearrange everything.  Shifts in energies? (Now there’s another hippy-loaded word that makes me shudder, but for which I have no articulate alternative)  My own and the world around me?  Who knows.  But I’d be willing to be it plays a big part in my sudden desire to build Frankenhouse this year and nit-pick every single little detail anew.

How do you make a room feel “right”?