Free A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan Page B

lakes and rivers or, less propitiously, in swamps (where, hemmed in, it’s apt to turn into sha , the negative energy that is chi’s evil twin). And in fact several authorities state explicitly that water is a “conductor” of chi.
    As soon as I’d begun to think of chi as flowing water, I could visualize its movement over my land, as it searched out grooves in the earth and openings in the forest on its course down the hillside. To map a landscape’s dragon lines, a fêng shui doctor will sometimes travel to the top of a ridge and then run down it several times as heedlessly as possible, noting the various paths he naturally inclines toward, the points at which they intersect, and the places where his momentum is checked by hollows or inclines. The practitioner is said to be “riding the dragon,” something animals do as a matter of course. (And in fact animal paths are considered reliable conduits of chi.) Though I wasn’t quite prepared to ride the dragon, I thought I could picture where it would take me more or less, and it looked as though there was a positively torrential flow of chi coming down the hillside, most of it streaming down the cow path toward the pond.
    This seemed auspicious. At least until I delved deeper into the literature of fêng shui and learned that the quantity of chi isn’t everything—speed is just as important. And when a dragon line is particularly straight or steep, the chi is apt to travel too swiftly through the site to confer its benefits. Ideally, chi should meander through a site; torrents were no good. I felt proficient enough at visualizing the flow of chi to see that it was moving at a very rapid clip through the property, and probably whizzing right by my site in a feckless blur.
    I don’t mean to make fêng shui sound like a lot of hocus-pocus, because the more I learned about it, the more its images of energy flow and velocity began to square with my own more secular experience of landscape. Don’t we also think of landscapes in terms of speed and energy? We commonly describe a hill as rising “slowly” or “rapidly,” and we conceive of curves and straightaways in terms of their velocity. Once I began to think of fêng shui as a set of time-tested metaphors to describe a landscape, rather than as spiritual dogma, it became a lot less strange, and potentially even useful.
    I realized, for example, that everything that had been done to improve our property in the last century or so—the scooping out of plateaus for the house and barn, the opening of fields on the gentler hillside slopes, the repair of the drainage around the house, and, most recently, my digging of a pond—had the unintended effect of improving the fêng shui. My predecessors here and I have been unconsciously engaged in the work of moderating what had been (and to some extent still is) a tumultuous flow of chi through the property, creating fields and ponds, plateaus and gardens where it might slow and linger, and rerouting one main artery so that it would circle around the house.
    I started to see how a fêng shui doctor analyzing a given landscape’s chi and the picturesque designer studying its genius loci would end up recommending much the same improvements. Both would advise that straight paths be made to curve, that flat land (where chi is thought to stagnate) be rendered more hilly and rugged ground made to slope more gently. It seemed to me that the “eye” whose attention Humphry Repton or Capability Brown spoke of attracting and directing with their clearings and paths and follies isn’t so very different from the chi that fêng shui seeks to attract and direct. Likewise, the picturesque sensibility’s preference for variety in the landscape—its emphasis on the transitions between field and wood, hill and dale, light and shade—might just be another way of expressing the geomancer’s preference for those places in the landscape where yin and yang land forms meet. I don’t know if