Just For the Feng of It

It’s amazing the kind of curiosity you can stir when you do something as seemingly innocuous as clean your office.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a slob. OK. I’m not as bad as my old friend, Fritz. His apartment was perennially strewn with dirty clothes, dinner plates of congealing beef bones from the local Steak-Out restaurant and paychecks he never seemed to get around to cashing. One time he so convinced himself he was going to be fired from the newspaper where we worked as reporters that he stocked his freezer with six months worth of meat. He also bought a pair of pricey Kenneth Cole shoes for future job interviews, and then refused to take them out of the velvet bag they came in and actually wear them for fear of scuffing them up.

But I digress.

Neatness and organizational skills aren’t my strong suits. I like a tidy house just like the next metrosexual husband of the 21st Century. At home, I’m more inclined than not to pick up the stray sock and toss it in the hamper, empty and reload the dishwasher when the sink starts getting full and wipe down the bathroom countertop when it gets a tad too hairy for my liking.

Work, however, is another matter.

A lot of paperwork crosses my desk each day. OK. Not so much crosses as flounders halfway across the channel, gets leg cramps and sinks beneath the undulating waves of languishing press releases, story tips, newspapers, magazines, phone messages and notebooks, settling into a papery pauper’s grave. Dust gathers there too. And crumbs from lunches long digested and forgotten. Sometimes money and plastic toys my girls play with when they visit my office. Now and again I hear the faint howl and moan of a small dog, but I suspect this is rather a trick of acoustics and that the dog is actually outside somewhere or else a complete figment of my imagination.

Well, a week ago I decided to do something about the mess. My computer was being upgraded and could not be used for a couple of hours, so rather than stare out the window I thought it would be a good idea to neaten up the place where I essentially live for forty hours a week. I threw away a forest of paper, actually put files in my big gray file cabinet (so THAT’S what that’s for), wiped down all flat surfaces and a few vertical ones, donated an extra chair to my friend Blaze. My wife, excited at the prospect of no longer needing a tetanus shot when she comes to visit, celebrated my clean sweep by buying for me a small bookcase and a lamp so I wouldn’t have to sit in the glare of overhead fluorescent lights anymore. I had to admit, the lamp provided a nice aesthetic balance to the tabletop fountain I made during a fit of craft-mania one year.

Others seemed to notice, too.

“Looks like you’ve been watching a little too much ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,’” my alleged friend, Blaze, said as he walked by my office one morning. “Trying to put a little more Feng in your Shui?”

I noticed he was carrying a bag full of potting soil and other products for the plants he was nursing in his own office.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” I retorted smartly, cranking up my CD of chanting Benedictine Monks to drown out his ridicule.

A couple days later Blaze stopped by again and took a look around my now clean and sparkly office.

“You know, you can get your aura realigned too if you want,” he said. A few minutes later he sent an email proving that he wasn’t fibbing – a university in California (where else?) apparently offers the service to students, faculty and staff through its health clinic. I tried to imagine what an aura realignment entailed exactly. Did they rotate your chakras? Top off your body fluids? Would hot candle wax be involved?

Another coworker used the occasion of my recent office purge to recount her experience at a local spa. After her massage, the masseuse said my colleague still seemed a bit tense and offered to do a "magnetic deruffling" for her, gratis. The masseuse drifted toward the foot-end of the table, but my friend was stomach down and couldn’t tell what the masseuse was up to down there.

“Now,” said the masseuse, sotto voce, “I want you to relax and imagine a blue flame at the bottom of your feet.”

“Oooookay,” my friend responded.

And then – nothing. No sound. No sensation. Curious, my friend craned her neck to take a peak and found the woman making dramatic sweeping motions with her hands, from just behind her feet toward the floor. Needless to say, my friend was not impressed.

Then I got a Feng Shui kit.

It was a gift from Blaze and his wife, Amy, who picked it up at a Starbucks, where they make almost daily pilgrimages for the new Chantico drink, which I’ve been assured tastes like a liquid brownie. Strangely, although I love chocolate, I find the idea of a liquid brownie unappetizing. The Feng Shui kit, on the other hand, is pretty sweet.

This is what it comes with: Tazo tea in three flavors -- Zen, Calm and Awake; a Feng Shui Color Guide, a Legend of Feng Shui, Three Powerful Figures of Fortune, the Feng Shui Guide to Happiness, a list of Nine Perfect Thoughts, a Feng Shui Wind Poem, Three Lucky Coins and One Powerful Dragon Figure.

Imagine, all that wisdom and serenity in a box that weighs in at just 1.4 ounces.

Of course, the figures are little cardboard cutouts, as are the coins. And the Nine Perfect Thoughts, which are to be torn off at the perforations and carried around for good luck, are about as profound as the slips of paper you find in fortune cookies at low-rent Chinese restaurants. They range from banal to painfully unfunny. To wit (or not):

“I possess the luck and the fortune of the dragon.”

“When my furniture is in alignment, I no longer bump my shins.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the stove before I leave to work.”

“Perhaps this is the year I will get new drapes.”

And so on.

In the brief Legend of Feng Shui I learn that the term itself is pronounced foong shway, not like something Garth from Wayne’s World might say when a good-looking woman passes by.

I have to admit, though, I do kind of like the Wind Poem, or “weathergram,” that comes with the kit. It’s basically a tag where you can write down a simple thought, prayer or poem, and then hang it from a tree limb for some stranger to find. Inside the tag it says, “If you are touched by the message on this Wind Poem, please feel free to take it: You might offer the string to a bird for its nest.”

I like the idea of leaving inspirational messages where people you don’t know might find them, the anonymous kindness of it. It seems like a very simple, pure gesture in a world where we’re bombarded by messages and demands and come-ons. There’s no reward for our gesture – or at least none we will know about. If we find the tag missing one day, it could just be that the wind blew it down, or some litter officer stuffed it in his trash bag, or a bird decided to use the whole thing to line its nest. Then again, maybe someone who was on the edge of despair came across it just when she needed it and thought of it has a blessing from an angel, which in a way maybe it was.

So the next time you’re out and about, walking among the budding trees, keep an eye peeled. There might just be a little Wind Poem blowing in the breeze, waiting for you to pluck it from a quivering branch.

How Shui it is.

A Wing and a Prayer

From up here it looks like someone murdered the Holy Spirit.

The pigeon is splayed on its back against the alley’s wet, filthy pavement, its head wreathed in fresh blood. The tail feathers are fanned out, and the smoky blue wings – which are creamy white on the undersides – are half open and akimbo. The head is cocked slightly and a solitary, tangerine eye remains open and fixed on the purple-gray sky as if the pigeon is waiting for someone to descend from the clouds, scoop it up and take it back where it belongs.

I’d heard the soft thump of flesh striking glass, a common enough occurrence in an office building with large picture windows. Usually the bird glances off, tumbles a bit and then claws its way back into the air, no worse for the encounter. But this was different. It sounded different. The flurry of feathers dropped away and down like a diver pitching backwards off the gunwale of a boat. I stood up to look where it had gone.

The pigeon was upright on the ground, two stories below, taking halting steps along the alley and shaking its head, the way people do in cartoons when they’re trying to shake loose some crazy idea. Okay, I thought. It’s disoriented. In a minute or two it’ll flex its wings, scoop up some air and join the thirty or forty of its kin making the mid-afternoon rounds of the downtown sky. Only it didn’t. The head-shaking slowed until the pigeon looked like it was nodding off to sleep.

I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, asking God to fix whatever was hurting in the bird. I tried to will it to fly. But the impact and fall broke something inside it that was beyond repair. Suddenly, the pigeon started flapping violently and flipped itself onto its back. That’s when I saw the splatters of blood on the ground, the red glistening in its beak. It took two or more shuddering breaths and then it died.

Now I feel as though I’m in mourning. Yeah, maybe it’s a little crazy. I mean, lots of people consider pigeons to be nothing more than “flying rats” that carry diseases and crap on statues and fight over breadcrumbs in the public squares, making a general nuisance of themselves. But I’ve never liked to see birds or other animals in peril or suffering. I always brake for squirrels. If there’s a bug in the house, I catch it, open the door and let it loose outside. Once, when I was living in South Carolina, I stopped my car to help a turtle cross the road because I was afraid the next driver might not notice it and smash it to smithereens.

A couple years ago I made the mistake of leaving a door open to my garage a few days too many. A family of sparrows came in and built a nest in a stack of wood I kept on shelves mounted close to the ceiling, which meant that I couldn’t close the door all summer because the mom and dad sparrows wouldn’t be able to go out and look for food for the babies. One morning I saw that a recently hatched chick had fallen from the perch, hit the roof of the van parked in the garage and tumbled to the cement floor. Miraculously it was still alive. So I put on my leather work gloves, gently scooped the frail creature in my hands and climbed a ladder to put the bird back in its nest. All summer I worried about that chick, wondered if it would survive, wondered if it might have picked up my scent and been rejected by the parents. The next summer I got my answer. We had bought a new house and I needed to take down the wood and there, dry as a fig and half as big, were the desiccated remains of the baby bird. I tried to not let it bother me, but it did, and I felt like I shared some of the blame for the bird’s death, though I can’t say why.

In Luke, Jesus says, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke 12:6-7). Most folks who read that passage focus on the part about people being really important to God. And while that’s true, it also says that not a single creature on Earth is forgotten by God. Not an ant. Not a flea. Not those annoying bugs that skitter up your nose and buzz in your ear at the height of summer. Not an elephant killed for its ivory, or a bear for its paws. Not the loon that gets caught in a plastic soda can ring carelessly discarded by a boater and drowns. Not the baby sparrow born in my garage. Not the pigeon that, giddy for the gift of flight, mistook a window for the sky and flew straight through death’s open door.

Personally I prefer the other name for pigeons, the one they had before they fell from grace in the eyes of human beings and were relegated to the trash-heap category of pest: Rock Dove. Dove. Symbol of peace.

Symbol of the Holy Spirit.

It’s a little thing, but I’m glad the Rock Dove didn’t die alone. Even though I was two stories up and could do nothing to save it, it wouldn’t seem right for its life to pass without someone noticing. No one, no living creature, should die alone.

Every hair on your head. Every feather. Every first and final breath.