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Open the compass on your phone and turn until it reads between 202 and 247.
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That is southwest. In most apartments it works out to one corner of one room, and there is a decent chance the thing standing in it tonight is a laundry basket.
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In Chinese house reading, that is the marriage corner, and people have been careful about what goes in it for a very long time.
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The Marriage Corner Is Not a Spell. It Is an Inventory.
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The system cuts any space into nine sectors and hands each one a subject. Southwest belongs to the trigram Kun, three broken lines, the receptive earth, the mother of the household. Its subject is partnership.
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The trigram is three thousand years old; reading a house by a compass is younger, and the corner has meant the same thing the whole way through.
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Two schools disagree about where to stand. The older one takes the compass bearing, southwest, the arc from 202 to 247 degrees, while the American version maps the corner off the front door instead. Take the compass, since it is the one with arithmetic in it.
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The rules for that corner are short, and every one of them is something you can check before bed:
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Pairs. Two lamps, two candlesticks, two chairs, and nothing that matters standing there by itself. |
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Earth materials. Clay, stone, ceramic, the heavy things that do not get moved twice a week. |
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Earth colors, with some red or pink in there, because in the five-element cycle fire feeds earth. |
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No water. No fountain, no fish tank, no glass left on the sill overnight. |
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No tall green plants, because wood takes from earth rather than feeding it. |
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No pile, no stack, no box, and no picture anywhere in it of one person by herself. |
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Here is the part that does the work. Before you move a single object, stand in that corner and write down what is already in it.
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In American bedrooms it is usually the laundry chair, or the exercise bike, or a box that has not been opened since the move.
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Nobody puts the good lamp in the corner nobody looks at. Nobody hangs a photograph in a space they walk past sideways. Nobody keeps two of anything in a house arranged for one.
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The corner does not predict your life. It records it.
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Which is why the practice is worth doing whether or not you think a compass bearing moves anything at all. Clearing it takes twenty minutes, and it makes you pick up, one at a time, every object you have been storing in the part of your home assigned to partnership.
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Whatever is in there tonight, you put it there, and you are the only one who can carry it back out.
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Also True
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What They Found
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Arthur Aron’s lab paired off strangers and handed them a list of thirty-six questions that escalate, starting at the trivial and ending somewhere past what most people tell their friends, then four minutes of holding each other’s gaze. The pairs who worked the list reported far more closeness than the pairs assigned small talk. What the study turned on was not chemistry, it was a sequence followed in order.
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The Mirror
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What is standing in the southwest corner of your bedroom right now, and how long has it been standing there?
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Today’s Devotion: Find southwest tonight and take one photograph of that corner exactly as it stands. Do not tidy it first.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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