I’ve been remiss in my blogging, thanks to finals and thanks to some more traveling as Abigail and I try to get a more solid feel for where we want to live after graduation. Nothing solid to report as yet, but we know that we dislike Texas.

I have eight months left before I graduate and enter the wild blue yonder of the world beyond formal schooling. It’s a transition that basically coincides with my 30th birthday, and astrologically fits with the whole concept of the Saturn return.

I’ve been feeling more and more strongly the powerful energy that wants to, and could, be channelled through me, if I were pure enough. Divine energy, for lack of a better term; cosmic energy that flows down from the heavens. I find that it’s stronger if my mind is clearer; it’s stronger if my heart is relaxed and open. It’s stronger if I’m just physically relaxed. Of course all of these are difficult in a stressful, fast-paced life like that of a busy graduate student. I always feel the flows more strongly on breaks.

I also notice that there is a force that opposes this flow of Divine energy or love, and my experience of it is that it is dark, and heavy, and obscure, and emotional; and in many ways it makes a lot of sense why others have labeled it “evil” or “sin,” because that’s exactly the type of energy it feels most resonant with. It growls; it rages; it sits low in the body, condensed, tight, unwilling to balance. In me I feel that it drives everything from violent urges to odd musical preferences. It’s the shadow, that repository of all those things that we consciously believe that we are not — but that remain in us, untransformed and untransmuted, unintegrated.

In contrast with those that believe that purity lies in leaving the shadow behind, I am of the belief that the shadow is an inextricable part of our natures, and that the only way to “get rid” of it is to transform it. It’s the thick jungle of spiderwebs, rats, and cockroaches under the house. You can’t get rid fo it, but you can stop ignoring it and, instead, find a way to bring it into balance with the rest of the house, without changing its basic nature. You can’t turn the basement into the attic, but you can remodel it to make it a part of the house.

Another analogy: Trash can be just a heap of garbage, or it can be correctly composted and transformed into fertilizer for a beautiful garden.

That’s a difficult challenge, though: On one hand, to strengthen one’s own experience of love, awareness, and insight so that facing one’s shadow is even possible; and on the other hand, to delve into the muck headfirst, get your hands dirty and start the spring cleaning.

Amidst all of this, I’ve noticed something else, on a different scale. After returning from my travels back to our house here in Florida, I suddenly noticed two things: That the energy at the house is denser, and that my lungs felt weaker.

The lung thing made sense; I’ve heard ever since moving here that this town was notorious for causing people lung problems, and I’ve certainly seen it in the clinic — a lot of people come in with sinus congestion or asthma or allergies.

The density thing might also make sense in terms of the lower elevation and higher humidity, except that thirty feet away, up the driveway, it feels really different. And then I started to think about a number of things that have happened around the house lately, and things started to come together.

Our house is at the edge of a pond, and appears to be at a low point along the road; for the last couple of years, that low point got progressively worse until every time it rained heavily, a veritable river of runoff water came pouring down our driveway and collected there, sometimes flooding all the way up to our front doorstep, usually flowing down and dumping sand all over our backyard. We had to build a mound of sand to keep it away from the front door.

Also there’s been a leak under the bathroom sink that has led to the whole bathroom cabinet needing to be removed and replaced. The cockroach population seems to be on the rise too.

I just wonder if there’s a connection between these things and the way that our emotional life and health has been affected, as well as the way I’ve been experiencing qi lately. The qi in my body feels distinctly more compressed, in a way that’s difficult to describe. Things are just thicker here.

I don’t quite know all of the connection, but my intuition tells me there’s something there. At the least, it’s all made me a little more aware of the effects of environment, and made me wonder if there’s more to the ancient art of feng shui than I’ve ever given credit.

I found an unfinished, unpublished book called Geomancy: Beyond Feng Shui by Tom Graves, which makes a start at exploring feng shui and other aspects of study of personal environment, in a fascinating way.

The real feng shui is much more complex than those glib generalisations about ‘moving your stuff around’. And it’s by no means unique, though it’s certainly presented as such in the publishing field: so much so that one respected author, for example, was forced to title her book “Feng Shui For The Soul”, even though feng shui as such was mentioned on only three pages, and her basic model was derived from Native American traditions rather than Chinese ones. As that book indicates, feng shui is actually only one local form of a generic practice known as geomancy, which can be found in one form or another in every culture worldwide, at every period in history. Geomancy literally means ‘divining the land’, and is concerned with creating an understanding of our relationship with the spaces in which we live, at every scale from a bedroom or an office desk right up to the landscape as a whole.

He cites, among others, the Indian art of vastushastra, which is as complex as Chinese feng shui, as well as “the subtle layers of life and actions in Balinese or Hopi villages, for example, or the ’songlines’ of Australian Aboriginal cultures, in which the same mythic ‘Dreaming’ is echoed exactly in the features of the local landscape at frequent intervals across hundreds or thousands of miles, and across real boundaries of space, of peoples and of languages.”

The physical form and layout of homes, backyards, communities, shared spaces and the wider landscape have real effects on people living there: even the most ardent materialist would have little doubt of that. Others are willing to go well beyond the material realms: for example, dowsers and water-diviners have long since argued that in the layout of sites both ancient and modern there are consistent patterns of underground water and other ‘energies’ of various kinds - all of which have identifiable, and often adverse, effects on human health. Some researchers, especially in Germany, identify regular grids of apparent energies at many different scales, from the ‘Curry grid’ and ‘Hartmann grid’ with spacings measured in small numbers of metres, and on upward to a wide variety of supposed ‘planetary grids’. Others again, particularly in Britain, have shown a close correlation between landscape features and all manner of strange phenomena, from ancient legends of hauntings, hangings and hobgoblins through to supposed ‘UFO’ incidents of the present day.

And there are new concerns of a geomantic kind, some of them created by the new technologies of the present day. Microwaves and mobile phones can cause real physiological problems; underground faults and underground water alike can create havoc with people’s health, as can the ’sick building syndrome’ which arises from inadequate architectural design. Even the success of technology can itself cause problems: the efficient insulation of modern houses can create a build-up of radon gas - a by-product of the natural radioactive decay of certain types of rock, such as the granites of southern Cornwall - which is clearly linked to an increase in certain types of cancer.

There’s certainly a lot there to explore, more than I have time for at present. But, food for future thought.

So, these are just a few things that have been nagging at my consciousness. I’ve always been more of an inwardly-focused person, and I think that continues to do me a lot of good. But my own body experience has led me to start turning my attention a little bit outward, noticing how my body interacts with my natural environment. You’d think that having lived in the woods would have taught me that — and it did, but the violence of that experience set me back. I’m only now beginning to send little baby feelers back out into the subtle wonders and energy flows of the world.