We give them different names: streets, roads, boulevards, avenues, and lanes. We walk them and drive them. The road or street leading to and away from your home not only delivers you personally back and forth to your destinations. It also carries with it something the Chinese refer to as "ch'i." This "ch'i" is energy. It is the air currents, which exist even when you don't palpable feel it like a gust of wind.

It is also no coincidence that often the most affluent people in a city or town live up high in the hills where the winding road twists and turns over and over again in order to wind up the hill. This is like churning butter. The ch'i gets better and better as the roads or streets help create curving, circular movements, as opposed to straight lines which exist on so many of the right angle grids of structures built on flat lands.

Does a house with a winding road leading up to it guarantee good feng shui, or that the occupants will be healthy, happy, and prosperous? The answer is no. This one feature to the surrounding environment will not guarantee all the good things in life we all aspire towards. But it helps! It is just one of many features to look at when feng shui principles are taken into consideration when choosing where to live.

The curve of the road can also tell a story depending on which way it goes. For instance, if the road raps around your house, forming a semi-circle, that is a very embracing circumstance with positive benefits and the ability to attract more wealth. To the contrary, if a street suddenly veers away from your house after initialing moving towards it, this is like a reckless driver swerving to avoid an accident. The good chi (or energy) that was moving towards your house gets suddenly whisked away, like having your purse grabbed. People in homes with this kind of positioning on their street often find it hard to save money.

In many feng shui books, there is a reference to the home that sits at the end of a street intersection, called a T-juncture. Supposedly this house is always in harms' way and any kind of tragedy can occur because of it. While I agree that this is usually not the best alignment of a house to a street, there ARE exceptions to the rules. With all the ch'i moving in a straight line towards that house, it also depends on what kind of house it is and the inherent energy inside.

Recently, I looked at a home where the garage in front was aligned directly with an oncoming street. The occupants used the garage as their primary entrance into the house, so it was really just the same as having a front door aligned directly with an oncoming street. The energy inside that garage (based on when it was built and what direction it was facing) is the kind of energy that can make occupants sad, lonely, sickly, and especially hard for a woman to get married or have a man live with her.

Another feature to the home's actual front entrance, which they also use, is that the occupants can have upper body, lung and head problems. In this particular house, one unmarried woman recently died in her forties from nose cancer. Her sister, who lived with her and who still occupies the house, has asthma and is married but her husband lives in another city and has never lived with her in that house. Strange but true! This is an example, where a house can indicate a number of potential health or relationship problems and if there is a road or street causing more stress or stimulation to the house, it can make the end result much more severe. I know this to be fact from so many case studies, including other clients who lived in a similar house as the one just described, but without the added irritant of the oncoming street alignment. Generally they do not have such an untimely tragedy.

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© Melt Magazine 2004