7th August 2005
Lap Chow: Autumn begins; Celebrity squares; Soraya Part One…; Soraya Part Two…
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Lap Chow: Autumn Begins
Solar fortnight beginning:
Thursday August 7th 2005 18.51
Hour Day Month Year
metal water wood wood
sun quai gap yute
yuw hoi shen yuw
rooster pig monkey rooster
Lap Chow: Autumn Begins
This the beginning of Autumn, a depressing thought, also the start of the Monkey month. The Monkey is ingenious and full of tricks and he has a particular affinity with the Rooster that rules this year, both being metal in nature. Metal is competitive, it can even be aggressive. The Rooster’s yin metal at its worst is bitchy – what the Chinese call por kwan – at its best, convivial and chatty. The Monkey is a useful ally and a devious enemy. These are the characters that rule August 2005.
As for the characters from which we might predict – the Imperial Heaven Stars – they are fun gok and bou din. The first is the Queen’s Holiday Mansion which is a nice thought for August but actually implies a window of girl power like the one earlier in the year which brought us Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign. Bou din is the Hall of Jewels– boundless wealth. Who for and how, I wonder?
As far as the things we want to be able to predict are concerned: the Monkey could easily be represented by a confused Imam and fun gok burka power. I would not be surprised if someone with access to the version of the Koran with the word “mercy*” included – probably a woman – made a powerful and unifying statement from within the Muslim community.
Ignore this please, Guardian Diary.
Celebrity Squares
It’s a funny thing being a z-list celebrity.
Parking pre-survey outside Nick’s home in Brighton I scrape the bumper of a rather smart 4×4 with my very scruffy Espace. It is 6.50 am, I‘ve been up since 5 again. Intuitive as hell but with the sort of co-ordination that makes me likely to turn my cassette over twice and lose half the consultation. Fortunately I’m the world’s slowest driver.
I leave one of my leaflets under the wiper with a note. When the owner calls me, he addresses me as “Richard” and we talk as if he has known me all my life.
Then I am in London returning to Waterloo by bus, from a survey in North London. The bus terminates in Trafalgar Square because of a security alert at Aldwych. The woman in front of me remonstrates with the driver and does not understand his explanation. Her English is fractured. I remind her simply about the explosions last week There could be more bombs anytime, I explain. She nods resignedly, turns and looks at me:
“Hi know hugh. Hugh are de feng shee man.”
This astonishes me; no one watches Channel 5 in Surrey. As a matter of fact, my mother-in-law disapproved on principle of ITV.
* Let us not forget, by the way, how many Bibles seem to have been printed without the word “forgiveness”.
Soraya Part One: The Dangers of a back-to-front West facing house in a Rooster Year
Soraya has deep spiritual gifts but she is desperate. So hugely in debt that it makes no difference if she spends more. Her husband is ill.
The house is the wrong way round; that is to say that the front should be the back and vice-versa. One powerful indication of this is when the back garden is lower than the front. Hers is drastically low.
To make it worse the house is East-West oriented. This year the tai sui is in the West. In other words the urgent changes I must make can not start at the East or West this year. This is even more true so close to the Summer Solstice. Catching this I make major changes to the South East and North West before I part but I will leave a long list of changes for her to undertake.
Thank heavens, the chi is falling now Midsummer is past; these changes will not keep.
The heart of the problem is at the tai chi, the heart of the house. A house on an East-West axis has money built into it. It should be hard to be in financial trouble here but I’ve seen this wrong-way round thing before. Money out instead of in. So I perform procedures to turn it round.
Soraya herself remains anguished. I tell her that her first job is to stop beating herself up.
Why do we beat ourselves up? Because we can not live with our choices. Why can we not live with our choices? Because we do not or will not believe them to be choices. Sometimes this is so hard.
“How could I have chosen such a series of disasters?” we ask ourselves. Soraya asks me several times. I set her the initial task of sitting at the tai chi and simply feeling. The important thing is to feel without attribution. That is: do not explain.
Soraya Part Two: Mystical Stuff : Approaching God via the tai chi.
Do not explain; I sometimes think the question why is the most useless in the language. I don’t really care why. I just want positive change.
At the tai chi where all the different pockets of chi intersect, there is no hiding place from feelings – no moving of furniture, no painting, no re-decoration – and to feel openly is not pain. Pain is not in feeling; it is in not-feeling. The problem with anger is not being angry but trying not to be. The problem with anguish is being anguished about anguish. But we do feel the way we feel and we do have to start from where we are.
For reasons I am not egregious enough to second-guess, we appear to arrive on the planet with a series of lessons to learn; a curriculum if you will. These lessons come wrapped in feelings, many of which we don’t like much. As we open to them we progress and they are less and less painful. If we really choose the feeling before us, above all things, however unattractive it looks, things move quickly and we are more awake, less pained and more in command of our lives. This, I think is the tao.
Soraya needs to feel past the feelings she dreads. I reassure her this will not hurt. It was Blaise Pascal who said that most of the world’s problems are to do with people not being able to sit still. Some of us never take the few moments of stillness that would change our lives forever. Mystics call this the via negativa, or the apophatic approach to God. It is the expressway to change.
Feedback is encouraged including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case.
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
If Poverty is to be History now is the time.
As ever, names have been changed to protect privacy.