Feng Shui for Everyday Homes　Prologue – “The Breathing Entrance

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The entrance is where qi — life energy — first whispers into your home.
Before it reaches the living room or the bedroom, it has to pass through this small threshold.

People, shoes, worries, parcels, laughter —
all of them begin their story in your home with that single step over the doorway.

When the entrance is heavy and cluttered,
the whole house feels as if it is holding its breath.

When the entrance is light and clear,
the rooms at the back quietly start to breathe again.

You don’t have to fix the whole house at once.
In Feng Shui, the entrance is called “the mouth of the house.”
If you care for this one place, the rest of the home slowly follows.

A Small Ritual: Clearing the Mouth of the House

Start with the simplest things:

• Shoes left at the door go back into the shoe cabinet.

• Bags and parcels find their own place instead of piling up by the entrance.

• Outdoor and leisure gear returns to its “next adventure” spot.

It doesn’t have to look like a magazine spread.
Think of it more like this:

That small difference is enough.
Even that can make the air at the door feel a little lighter when you come home.

Light and Green: Let the Entrance Breathe

A dark entrance weighs on the mind.
It pulls your energy down before you even take off your shoes.

Try switching the bulb to a warm-white tone
and make the space just one step brighter.

If you can, add a little green:

• A plant on a small stool or low shelf

• A simple vase with one flower you like

• Dried flowers on busy weeks, fresh flowers on easy days

It doesn’t have to be perfectly styled.
What matters is a quiet intention:

That feeling, held gently in your mind,
slowly shows up as the “atmosphere” of your entrance.

Homes That Let Fortune Slip Away

In classical Feng Shui, there is a phrase:
“a house that lets wealth leak out.”

It sounds dramatic, but the idea is simple.

Imagine a layout where, from the entrance,
you can see a large window or glass door directly ahead in a straight line.

In this case, it is said that the qi that enters through the front door
runs straight out through the window,
and good fortune — including financial luck — has a hard time staying in the home.

It’s as if good luck walks in, looks straight ahead, and says:

When your home feels like this,
you can gently bend this straight “through line” and soften the flow.

Gently Bending the Flow of Qi

If you have a big window directly in line with your entrance,
try small adjustments like these:

• Hang lace curtains plus a thicker curtain on the window.

• Place a partition, screen, low shelf, or large potted plant
  somewhere along the straight line between the entrance and the window.

The idea is to turn a straight corridor for qi
into a gentle S-shaped curve.

By adding just one soft “bend” in the path of qi,
the energy that enters has a reason to stay and swirl inside your home
instead of rushing straight out.

I can’t promise it will make you rich overnight.
But it gently moves your home toward this:

Tonight, when you come home and turn the key,
you might pause for a second and simply ask yourself:

Sometimes, the smallest space in the house
is the first place where your life begins to change.

Episode 3 | A Wandering World and the Night I Stepped Into the Dark

Ever since the night I found that tent on the hill,
I’ve been dropping by the old man’s studio from time to time.

His studio was in a classroom of an elementary school
that had long since been closed down.

A place where children’s voices must once have echoed
was now quietly filled with the presence of his works.

I was slowly, inevitably drawn in
by his sensibility, his way of thinking, his way of living.

In the studio, past works and half-finished pieces
were lined up side by side.

The smell of wood dust mixed with incense and sage.
Soft candlelight and indirect lamps washed over the room,
and in that glow you could feel the presence of dreams and ideas
that were just about to be born.

The air itself seemed to gently stir
that small excitement in the depths of my chest.

The old man would always talk about his pieces —
what he felt, what he had in mind when he made them —
with a boyish kind of joy.

But my own stories were always about other people.

Back then, I was lost in many ways,
and my heart felt locked in the same place, unable to move.

I had things I wanted to do,
but I kept blaming timing and the people around me,
refusing to take even a single step on my own.

I think everyone has a time like that.

When you know exactly what you’re doing,
and still can’t make yourself move —
there’s that awful, tired feeling toward your own inaction.

Looking back now, I was all excuses and no action.
Maybe that’s exactly why I kept going to that studio,
drawn to the way the old man chose to live.

That day too, I was repeating the same old excuses.
Work. The future. My circumstances.
Going round and round in the same small circle.

And then, all of a sudden,
the old man raised his voice in a way I had never heard before.

“Enough. Just get in the car.”

He didn’t explain anything.
I simply did as I was told and slipped into the passenger seat.

The car left the lights of town behind
and turned onto a road with almost no signs of life.

Before long, we pulled into a crumbling parking lot
alongside a wide river.
In front of us, the dark water flowed silently by.

Without a word, the old man turned the wheel
toward a ramp at the edge of the lot,
and the car began to descend underground.

We went deeper and deeper down.
It was pitch black.
Only the headlights carved out thin slices
of concrete pillars and walls.

On the walls were spray-painted graffiti
and ominous messages like,
“If you leave here, you die.”

Halfway down the slope,
a huge mural of an eight-headed serpent
sprawled across the concrete.

The farther we went,
the more the darkness seemed to swallow everything whole.

“Get out,” he said flatly.

I opened the door and stepped down into the dark.
Little by little, my eyes adjusted.

Shattered glass.
Furniture and trash left scattered where they’d fallen.

The glass was long gone.
From the bare frames,
only cold, damp air slipped slowly into the corridor.

The dampness in the air felt thick,
as if time itself had pooled and gone stagnant there,
sinking to the floor and refusing to move.

It was as if, in this one spot,
the hands of the clock had stopped decades ago
and never started again.

“…What is this? What’s going on?”

The place itself, the reason we were there —
I didn’t understand any of it.
My head was full of questions.

What I didn’t know yet was this:

that this place, sunk in darkness,
would one day change the way I saw life,

and be reborn as a hotel
that people would one day call “the ghost hotel.”