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West
Meets East by © Caroline Patrick Teenager’s Alignment Is your home a work in progress? Before I was introduced to feng shui, the art of placement, I left those outside improvements to my husband. Caring for the children, the home and all the responsibilities that come with a family, I certainly didn’t feel that the outside maintenance of our homes was my duty also. But, as life has a way of changing situations, I found there were many years the kids and I were the only available labor sources. The main income came from their father and his work took him "on the road" several weeks at a time. Clearing and cleaning up piles of brick, lumber, weeds, rocks and debris seemed to be a full-time job. Getting the children to help was another matter! One of our 14 houses had 80 acres to care for, plus wheat, barley, chickens, ducks, six dogs, two cats, two cows, one pig, a four-acre garden to hoe and harvest. Our son loved the outside. Through heat, cold, snow, rain and wind, he was a constant companion to the necessary farm chores from the ages of 9 to 18. The high desert living filled his soul. Willingly he trudged behind me as we changed irrigation water and watched nature in its wonderment. Changing colors filled the southwest skies and mountaintops silhouetted the next day’s sunrises and sunsets. The constant farm work was my husband’s answer to teenage development and a natural determent from teenage troubles. He was right as usual. Nature in her calmness buffers those pent-up yang (fire) emotions during the growing-up years. Chasing runaway cows out of the neighbor’s corn crop certainly keeps a young person busy for hours and sometimes days. Exhaustion from exercise defuses the importance of debate. Our daughter, although a good student, detested her teenage isolation or what she termed torture. Many of her friends loved her location and enjoyed the freedom of outdoor barbecues and entertaining. There was always a crowd at the evening dinner table. Her life revolved around the phone. Having a ten-person party line refers to ten neighbors within ten or fifteen miles share a phone line in the country. The frustration level can be over the top, when waiting on "the most important call of her life," which, as most of us adults know, was a daily thing. Her idea of escape was to always have a job in town. This privilege could be revoked at any time due to a slip in grade points. To buy some freedom from the farm, she stayed a top student. Try as you might, raising children is an enormous project. The parent feels like it’s a circus juggling act. Keeping one step ahead of raging hormones becomes a life challenge. Using feng shui along with a dose of psychology is the perfect antidote. At the time, feng shui, or the balance of the nine aspects within ourselves, hadn’t been presented to me. Psychology was my only ally. The alignment correction was to send my daughter outside to hoe the garden and pull weeds. Watching her from the window to make sure she didn’t escape her plight, I could see the hoe raise high into the air with such anger, the force of the steel tool when chopping into the ground bit a hold deep into the earth and my poor green beans would fly in all directions as resentment fueled her body from the last disagreement. After one long row, her anger eased and she would become distracted by any moving object. Ground squirrels, horny toads, butterflies were a good reason to stop hoeing. All the animals stopped to watch this process as it was a rare sign for them to see her doing "hard time." As if in a Disney movie, the pig called Pork Chop, the steers named Daisy and T-bone, stared in humble amazement at the girl on outdoor assignment! The chickens gathered pecking around her feet and the ducks waddled closer to cushion the pain. Soon she would be laughing and playing with all the dogs and cats who saved her from the boring act of farm work. Goofing off was her outside goal, which she perfected. Later in her adult life, she and her husband owned a farm. Phoning me after a large harvest of plums or green beans, we would laugh over her early experience of farm life as she would double check her recipes and timing tables for canning her produce. Of course, the opposite discipline was required for my son. Inside housework made us tangle, as he did laundry and husked corn for freezing. Using furniture polish was useless as the sandy soil crept under every doorway, as the breeze could whip up wind any time of day in the triangle mountain formations. We made it through the teenage years as other parents also find the proper solution for their families. The balance of family personalities is an everyday alignment. I wish feng shui or the rules of harmony could have been known to me during those adolescent days of my children, but hopefully I can impart this knowledge to those people wishing to make the teen years more manageable. Sign up for interest in summer classes: Paint It, Take It (acrylic painted object) Interest in fall classes:
Caroline is available for feng shui consultations, speaking engagements and teaching art, herbs and feng shui. After 2500 home and business consultations, her experience in combining these talents are recorded in her weekly newspaper column WEST MEETS EAST. Log on to her websites, www.fengshuiartistry.com and moongateschool.com for schedules, bio and weekly feng shui column. You can email her at caroline@fengshuiartistry.com with questions.
Caroline’s Arts & Feng Shui Shoppe 129 1st Street, Suite K Benicia 94510 707-748-1127 Open 1-5 daily, closed Monday
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