21st December 2004
The dying of the year; Lottery
Feng Shui Diaries
Dung see : Winter Solstice
Solar fortnight beginning
Tuesday Dec 21st 2004 20.33
Hour Day Month Year
wood wood fire wood
gap gap bing yute
sute yuw chee yuw
dog rooster rat rooster
The Dying of the Year
Dung gee, the Winter solstice, is as dark as it gets. The chi dissolves to embers so dark they seem to stop glowing. Then a moment later the chi is reborn and everything is brighter. From now the days get longer. The seeds consider quickening. The new year invites new resolve, new hope, new objectives.
The Chinese characters above tell us the nature of the New Year. The Rooster can represent both early evening and dusk. Is the light breaking or fading? Gloom is so easy but it’s not much use. My Feng shui Predictions for 2005 are intended to be useful and heartening. They follow over the next week or so. I believe there is a possibility that mass hunger can be over and that in 2005 an irreversible commitment can be made. But the opportunity is ribbon-thin.
Lottery “not Random” shock
A report surfaced in December that showed that certain numbers appear in the Lottery Draw more often than allowed for by chance.
I had concluded about five years ago that this was so when I read about a man with a system. What all gambling systems have in common, my poker-playing friends used to tell me, is that eventually you lose all your money. But this guy was winning. And the first thing he did each week was to exclude last week’s numbers. Probability says this should not help. Every number starts a week with the same odds. It is not affected by last week’s choice. How could it be? So if this system made him money, the numbers were not appearing randomly.
This does not suggest skullduggery. The late Robert Maxwell is said to have fiddled the results of magic number games in his newspapers but the Lottery results do not imply interference and the report does not even hint at it.
There were two anomalies. Both can be explained in feng shui terms. One was that the number 38 had come up too often. In the 8 Fate (1996-2016) the standard advice is that the numbers 2 & 8 are lucky. So those who knew this would be picking 38 along with 2, 28, 8, 22, 48,18 and so on. What is more interesting is that 3 can be both the partner of 8 (they are both wood in the out-of-doors arrangement of the Trigrams) and also enjoys a choi (money-making) relationship with 8.
The second oddity was this: in the Thunderball, when there was a preponderance of high numbers it was “echoed” (the report’s word) by a selection of unusually low numbers four weeks later. Had anyone worked it out – I hadn’t – this would be in line with the balancing of yin and yang across the phases of the moon.
Sounds like we’re onto something.
It’s never too late.
This last little while, I’ve been working for an actress, who has imprisoned her self Rapunzel-like in a top-floor flat. The block the flat is in was built over a 14th century plague pit and is as restless as buildings get. The magnetic interference made it impossible to obtain the same front door lo pan reading twice. One attempt at a back wall (sitting) measurement produced results on opposite edges of the compass that were not 180° apart. Which is of course impossible!
A North East-facing block will tend to attract woo-woo stuff but this is not, fortunately, due North East. She has set up the flat in such a way that it is not itself intimidating but at the cost of almost total isolation.
This is interesting because my general take on ghosts and infestation is that they are a distraction from human issues. A relationship falls into silence and a ghost appears.An adolescent is frustrated – in the many ways that adolescents can be – and things move about. An actress has her heart broken by one too many big opportunities turning to nothing and she hides herself away in a turret over a nest of uneasy spirits. She may use anything from illness to poverty to bring this about. This process is unlikely to be conscious and she is absolutely not to blame. However, the issue is not the ghosts, the illness or the misfortune but the withdrawal. And the last thing that the disappointed call for after years of introspection is probing dialogue. Which is what makes feng shui so effective: it can produce positive results whether you believe in it or not, approve or even know what’s going on. It’s not even crucial that you co-operate. though it’s quicker if you do and my preference is to work for the co-operative. As I often say: sometimes I can only put the ball on the penalty spot and you have to kick it.
She hadn’t slept through the night for several years. Given that her bedroom is designed around the contradiction of rosy pyramid shapes and glass, this is unsurprising. It’s in the North West, so whites are fine but the roses and purples have needed toning down to brown and yellow. As a rule of thumb, a sleepless bedroom is probably too yang, ie too bright and loud. Earthy browns and creams, all other considerations aside, support rest.
She is now sleeping through the night. And this should only be the beginning..
Lonely This Christmas
Following on the theme of the Rooster standing either for dawn or dusk, I have been struck by how many dormant issues woke with the new chi at dung gee. It is not always easy to see how often an issue flags that it is moving by getting worse before it gets better.
One client whose house backs onto the South East has a great chunk of this area missing where a conservatory at the back has made the house an irregular shape. The South East is the home of the eldest daughter so predictably what is slowing up her life is her need to care for (adult) daughter. Many parents can relate to this. We bring up a strong, happy, self-reliant child and then find ourselves redundant because of the good job we have done.
Which of us has not on some level, breathed a sigh of relief when our grown children screw up and need us again?
The configuration of this house put the South West very close to the South East. In this case then, very broadly, the mother gaining a life was represented by the South West where she had on my advice done a good deal of work to support relationship. The threatened South East threw up a big drama just before Christmas. The daughter had a serious and sudden problem which the mother could not ignore. That much was obvious. What was not so obvious was that this was part of the solution not part of the problem. It is a measure of her commitment to change that the mother is juggling compassion and practical help for her daughter with a continuing opening up in her own life.
Please wish her luck while I do my best to load the odds.
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Next time: Predictions for 2005
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richard features in the new series of Channel Five’s Housebusters:
Fridays 8.30pm Channel 5.