I didn’t realize what a hippie I was until I told my mother-in-law I was having a feng shui consultant come to the house and she said, “Feng what?” Lots of my friends responded to my cheerful announcement that I was going to take spring cleaning one step further and get the house “feng shui-ed” by saying, “Um, yeah, okay, whatever.”

So here’s a quick definition for those of you who didn’t spend your college years burning incense and reeking of patchouli. Feng shui is the Chinese art of balancing the elements of a home in order to create a harmonious surrounding for the inhabitants. The people I’ve met who are devotees swear that a feng shui home will fill your life with good health, romantic love, personal fulfillment, career success and money. Sounds really, really good to me.

In the past, when I’ve picked up a book about feng shui, it often featured a grid that you lay over the floor plan of your home. Living too much on plastic? Maybe you need a bamboo plant in the “money sector” of your house. Going out on one awful date after another? Maybe it’s because your kitchen is inconven-
iently placed in the “romance sector” of your house — all the love that is waiting for you is literally swirling down the drain. I’d try to implement the book’s suggestions, but I never was really sure whether to
credit luck, maturity or feng shui when my life started to improve for the better.

Now that I’ve settled in Center City with my husband and new baby, and my house resembles the tornado that is my life, it seemed a prime moment to give feng shui a proper try. I was worried that the person I hired would be a total kook, but my editor found a woman named Melani Lewandowski — and she was nothing short of brilliant. Melani is based in Maple Shade. Her clients include Twenty21, Fork and Neiman Marcus.

Before Melani’s arrival, I spent most of the day trying to get rid of my many, many piles of clutter. I’m pretty good at clearing out our closets and taking packages to Goodwill every couple of months. But I’m not so good at managing what we keep. At any given time you can find a heap of clean clothes on the chair in my bedroom waiting to be folded. My office is full of stacks of magazines I’ve yet to read but desperately want to read. And, while our kitchen is fairly spotless, our pantry is so disorganized that I’m always buying extra jars of wasabi mayonnaise and baking powder because I can never find the ones we already own.

I thought I knew exactly what Melani would say — the piles of clothes and paper and the pantry were blocked “energy sources,” cutting us off from all the good that could be coming into our lives. I also thought I knew exactly what she’d look like: hippie dippie, earth mother, wannabe priestess goddess. I was wrong on both counts. She arrived, tall and dark-haired in an elegant silk suit, looking like the head curator of a very fine museum. I gave her my smart-alecky “piles = blocked chakras” spiel. She said, yes, that was true to a certain extent, but that was Feng Shui 101.

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