Welcoming Water

Without water there is clearly no life on this planet. A fundamental building block of life, it is largely what we are made of. All ancient cultures revered water and included it in their categorization of the elements. As one of the five elements in Chinese culture, it plays a very important role in Feng Shui. The very name Feng Shui means wind and water.

The use of water in the Feng Shui of our landscapes is essential, particularly if we live inland and do not have access to lakes, rivers or the ocean. Dynamic water features provide movement to delight the eye, sound to encourage relaxation, and they increase the air quality by charging the surrounding air with negative ions. Each of these benefits will add to the positive chi of your outdoor spaces and create a stronger connection to the natural world.

Your front door is considered the 'mouth of chi', the place where energy enters your home from the surrounding environment. Creating a water feature at the front entry to your home is a great place to start. Water is symbolic of money as well as your social status so placing water at the front door encourages prosperity and an active social life to enter your home. An added benefit is that the gentle splashing of a water fountain will help to mask any traffic noise, creating a buffer zone between the neighborhood and your home. It is important that water runs either toward the home or straight down and not away from the home as we want to encourage prosperity and friends to flow in to our lives.

Water features do not need to be large or expensive but it is best if they are moving, or if they combine both moving and still water. An example would be a fountain which ends in a small pond of still water. This combination represents overflowing abundance which gathers and stays around for a while.

For those of us who either don't have the space or the resources for a large water feature even a birdbath can add life and movement to the front yard by attracting our avian friends and beneficial insects to the garden. Just be sure to keep the water very clean, preferably changing it daily preventing stagnation as well as mosquitoes.