What I’m Reading Now
In between finishing the index of Feng Shui for Real Estate and submitting a proposal for my next book, I decided to read something thoroughly enjoyable and quickly decided on Bill Bryson—my favorite author. I settled on two of his books that I hadn’t read: Notes from a Big Country and Seeing Further which he edited. The first book is a compilation of short articles that he wrote for a British magazine when he and his family moved to the United States in the late 1990s. In them he points out where this county has gone off the tracks, such as preferring a growing economy to a habitable planet. (He refers to that as “madness” and he’s absolutely right.) He quotes the economist Herman Daly: “The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.”
In an article concerning the wealth of choices confronting people in this country he talks about the abundance of choices actually creating dissatisfaction. “The more there is, the more people crave, and the more they crave, the more they, well, crave more. You have a sense in America of being among millions and millions of people needing more and more of everything, constantly, infinitely, unquenchably. We appear to have created a society in which the principle activity is grazing through retail establishments looking for things—textures, shapes, flavors—not before encountered.” He hits the nail right on the head. That’s exactly the attitude that has given us clear glass floors, which I caution people against in Feng Shui for Real Estate calling them a feng shui nightmare.
The other Bill Bryson book, Seeing Further, is subtitled The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society. It’s a glittering collection of brilliant essays and as soon as I finished I gave it to my husband (who loves to read science) and told him he would love it. He couldn’t put it down! In an essay titled “Globe and Sphere, Cycles and Flows: How to See the World” Oliver Morton has this: “Energy is flowing through the winds, in the currents of the oceans, in the rivers, in the growing of the grass. It flows out of the ground and down from the sky.” That reminds me of what I said on page 30 of Feng Shui for Hawaii Gardens where I discuss asphalt and cement as not being ideal because they block the energies from the earth. Later in that same essay, Morton says: “The Earth is not something put before us, or left behind us. It is around us and within us, turning on itself in every way it can as energy flows through it from the depths of the past and the fires of the Sun.”
