Free A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan Page A

met, an X marked the optimal site for your house or tomb. (There it was again!) I really couldn’t see how such an approach could possibly help me, but I decided to try.
    The first fêng shui primer I consulted —The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui by Stephen Skinner—said that “the amount of chi flowing, and whether it accumulates or is rapidly dispersed at any particular point, is the crux of fêng shui.” “Chi” is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible (but predictable) currents over the face of the earth, following both the natural and manmade contours of the landscape. This earth spirit animates all living things, and the more of it that enters and lingers in your building, the better. Though matters soon get more complicated, the basic objective seemed to be to find a site well supplied with chi.
    I found it helpful to think of fêng shui as the terrestrial counterpart of astrology. It is concerned with the influence of the earth spirit on human life in much the same way that astrology is concerned with the influence of the heavenly bodies. But while there’s nothing we can do to influence the planets’ paths, there is apparently a great deal we can do to influence the path of chi through a landscape, first through proper site selection and then through site improvement. In this respect fêng shui is a form of gardening. Like picturesque garden theory, it tells you how to improve a landscape, but to spiritual rather than aesthetic ends.
    So where do the dragons and tigers come in? Evidently the Chinese visualize the tallest forms in a landscape as a writhing dragon, and this high ground is the wellspring of chi. “The ridges and lines in the landscape form the body, veins, and pulse of the dragon,” Skinner writes, and the dragon’s “veins and watercourses [known as dragon lines] both carry the chi” down from the highest elevations. (You might assume that maximum quantities of chi will be found at the top of a hill, which is true, but because exposure to the four winds disperses chi so quickly, hilltops are generally considered poor sites.) The tiger is a similar though less prominent land form. A good site will have a dragon to its east and a tiger to its west, and face south, which the Chinese regard as the most beneficent of the cardinal points. Stripped of animal metaphors, the practical import of this principle is that people should build among hills, on ground neither too high nor too low, on a site that is open to the south and has higher ground to its north—advice, by the way, that Vitruvius would enthusiastically endorse. A more general rule of fêng shui holds that the topography of a site should strike a balance between yang land forms (the “male” ones, which tend to be upright) and flatter yin, or female, ones, such as plains or bodies of water.
    My brain crammed with these elementary principles, I paid a visit to the site, aiming to see it now with the eye of the geomancer, or fêng shui doctor. It appeared I had a good balance of yin and yang, since the site stood at the meeting place of forest and field. Also, the big rock seemed to offer a suitable yang to the yin of the clearing. The land rises precipitously to the east of the site, so I had what seemed like a nice-size dragon exactly where I wanted it. But try as I might, I could not find a tiger anywhere, which was discouraging, at least until I read in one of the books that wherever you find a dragon, there will automatically be a tiger too. I had no idea how they could be so sure, but decided not to worry about it for the time being. Because right now I had chi flows to worry about.
    As far as I could tell, chi has a lot in common with water. At least it helps to think of it that way, especially if your spiritual development is as retarded as mine. Like water (which also animates life), chi flows down from high ground through rills and swales in the land and then accumulates in