GETTING SOME FENG SHUI BACK INTO OUR LIVES…

We’ve been hoarding an unbelievable amount of stuff from clothes and shoes to magazines and books and makeup and gifts of lipsticks and vials of perfumes and bits and bobs and odds and sods that were blocking the free flow of all this cosmic energy. I read somewhere that if you haven’t used something for three years or have forgotten its existence then…just chuck it out. It was a good time as any to start clearing out the cupboards before the sizzling summer months sapped my energy and left me heavy and lethargic and the song of the cicadas dragged me into drugged out afternoon siestas. Yiannis’s uncle Giorgos, now long gone, with his twinkling blue eyes that would crease into laughter, used to tell us about his primary school teacher at the start of every summer. The class had him for all six years and he would send them off for their summer holidays with a smile and a deep sigh of pleasure as he uttered…`kai tora tha riksoume kati ipnous’…and now to go into some kind of sleep, insinuating that he would sink into semi-comatose during those long afternoon naps in the stillness of the summer heat. This was before the Second World War when Uncle Giorgos was a boy and teachers grew old in their trade and were fossilised in classrooms.

Well,  before I blink off into dormancy, let me get back to the subject of clearing the energy in the house. The first thing I did was to drag out the baskets of old makeup and endless samples of creams and aromatic soaps that had lost their scents and lotions dried up in their bottles and other such gubbins in different shapes and sizes. I rummaged through them, randomly picked a few for Lena, the cleaning lady and the rest I tipped into carrier bags and promptly dumped in the rubbish skips outside. I felt so much lighter and I could imagine some of that energy getting unblocked and dancing in little streams around the house. But there was more to be done. What about the handbags in the other cupboard? I pulled them all out and sat on the floor in the midst of the heap. This was a lot harder to bin because they marked the different phases of my younger life…a beige and brown that I acquired when I first set up the school, the ostrich leather bag that looked like a plucked bird with the bumps on it, that I took on our trip to Alaska and Canada and the various others from airport shops and what waves of nostalgia they welled up. But such emotions were just going to clog up the free flow of celestial energy from the far reaches of the universe and block them from swishing into the house and shaking up all those stagnant vibes and setting them free. So I bagged my emotions together with those bags whose leather had curled at the corners and had become brittle over the years and they went right into the skip.

This brings me to my neighbour across the street who once explained to me how she cleared out her mum’s house after she passed away. Her mum used to visit the street market every Monday when they set up their stalls in our neighbourhood. She would come back lugging carrier bags with all sorts of wares that the vendors had talked her into…yards and yards of synthetic lace, embroidered tablecloths that she stashed in cupboards and drawers to give people as wedding presents which she never got round to because there were just too many and aprons and towels and black house coats as she was a widow and so on and so forth. So when she passed, her daughter was faced with this warehouse of stuff spilling out of cupboards and peeping out of drawers, squirreled away over the years.

She told me that she walked into the house with an armful of rubbish bags and leaving her emotions at the door, pulled out tons and tons of stuff from cupboards and drawers and shoved them in the bags and dumped them in the skip. It took her two weeks. She didn’t ask for help from her family because they would interfere with her focus and single-minded blind determination…blind because she assured me that she didn’t look at the things she was tossing out in case those twinges of guilt crept in. This other friend of mine didn’t bother about the rubbish bags when her mother-in-law passed. The old lady never threw away anything and her cupboards were jam-packed with clothes, old and new and ancient bras and knitted socks and carnival clothes that she had stitched for her children and it went on and on. So my friend called the gypsy rag and bone man to come in and clear everything out. He came with the rest of his clan of rag and bone people and emptied all the contents of the cupboards into large black bags, which they hauled out and heaved on to battered flatbed pickups and rumbled off with her mother-in-law’s collectibles.

So recalling all this, I pulled up my socks…so to speak, of course, because just the mention of socks makes my skin itch in this sudden onslaught of summer heat…and I went through our winter wardrobe. Boy! Did it make my skin itch! All that woolly fluffy stuff that had been hanging in the basement cupboard for donkey’s years and some appeared moth eaten. Now I understand why my mother-in-law insisted I throw a handful of mothballs into the cupboards which I never did. I pulled down all that wintry stuff from hangers and shelves and pushed them into bags, almost with a vengeance for taking up all that precious space that would have breathed in all that peppy energy that had passed us by and went to other people’s houses…these other people who were not hoarders. Whatever possessed me to hang on to these things? I only left our favourites, the ones we wear over and over again, whose colours are not as vibrant and hang on us a little loosely but so comfortably. I approached our summer clothes in the same way. I kept one or two bags for the cleaning lady and the rest went promptly into the recycling bin. When I told Yiannis about it he was aghast.

He: Don’t take them to the recycling bin! ( Lately he has been pretending to be deaf.) I’ll take them to the soup kitchen or I’ll give them to some of my workers.

Yes we all know how that’s going to end…the clothes are going to sit in those bags for another 10 years and suck up all our Feng Shui. I said nothing and he never asked about them and at the end of the week when we were having our Sunday lunch at our favourite restaurant and sipping cold bubbly prosecco and eating fishy stuff and gazing out at the scintillating blue sea…I told him about the deed…about the several trips I had made to the recycling bin…He looked at me, his eyes a little glazed and his spirits lifted with the wine and said,

`Bravo!’

So cheers to that and all that Feng Shui that’s going slip into the house and create breezy draughts in the hot summer months!

Have a wonderful summer everyone!