My luck had not changed for the better some years ago, so I thought I would try a little bit of superstition.
I was new in Canada and still had not found a job based on my qualifications, so many of the other new immigrants advised me that I needed to change my bad karma (the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence) and get a feng shui frog.
I went to the Great Wall of China market and got the frog, which was an ugly looking thing, but it had something in its paws, that was very appealing. It held on to a huge coin for dear life and the coin looked like a hockey puck, maybe because this was a Canadian-Chinese frog. The coin was obviously gold coloured and this vertebrate was supposed to bring us riches. We were told to place the frog near the front door of our flat, but I thought it looked sadly like those bums on the street outside the public library, asking for loose change, and that it may create a bad impression on our visitors.
Over the weeks, the frog kept moving as the kids tripped over it when they headed out to school and once when a neighbour kicked it across the living room rug by mistake. But the frog still held on to the coin tightly and never let go.
I did not know it then, but I believe in many other cultures also the frog is thought to bring good luck. The Aborigines of Australia believed that frogs helped plants to grow by bringing thunder and rain. The Romans treated it as a mascot that brought good luck to one’s home. In ancient Egypt, it was a symbol of fertility and birth.
One day, the bell rang and I found two evangelists at the door asking whether they could come in. They introduced themselves and then asked my name. They did not blink when I told them my name, but when they looked around and saw the frog I could practically hear what went through their minds. They left the flat very soon promising to come back, but they never did. As time passed and nothing happened, another friend advised that we needed to change the bad energy from the auric fields around us, or something like that. One way to do that was to place a wind chime on the balcony so that the fresh breeze and tinkling noise will restore the flagging energy in the flat.
It was a windy season in Canada at that time and I nearly got blown off the balcony, trying to put up the wind chime. But my aura was good that day and I survived. Late into the night, as the winds howled, we could hear the wind chimes clanking merrily away as if to reassure us that this too would pass and that the storm was just a momentary hiccup in our lives.
But over the days, auric field or no auric field, it was getting a little maddening listening to the wind chime all the time, but I couldn’t risk climbing up again on the step ladder to bring it down. So I had to hit it with a broom and silence it.
Then someone said we had placed the bed all wrong in the bedroom. “Your feet should not be facing the door, it’s bad luck,” they said. “That means you will be carried out of the room feet first,” they said. I replied that it is better than being carried out head first, with people banging my head on the walls and door knobs.
But we had to change the whole bedroom setup and we borrowed my son’s compass to find out which way was North so that we could sleep soundly without passing away.