Monday January 21st 2008 00.40
Too Many Angels
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Monday January 21st 2008 00.40
Hour Day Month Year
Fire metal water earth
ding geng quai mow
zhen shen chou tze
ox dragon ox rat
Month: quai chou the water Ox
Solar Fortnight: dai hohn Great Cold
Too Many Angels
My i-pod is playing Jackson Browne’s I’m Alive as I arrive at Kim’s house. The song is Too Many Angels.
“There’s no end in sight; only the dark of night.”
Shadowy stuff on such a bright fresh morning.
I’ve been able to drive across country to her home in the wilds of West Sussex: the sleepy Saxon market town of Billingshurst is the closest thing to a metropolis I have passed. It has been a wonderful drive through the dawn, far better than the motorways and one-way systems. Good choice.
Choice or human chi is at the heart of transformation. Sometimes it may not seem that way but it remains the case. If we wish to change our lives, a good start is to choose change. And every year at this time, as the dark turns to light, anyone who is paying attention to the chi is considering the changing feng shui implications.
In 2008, the South has the short straw. It holds not only the san sha or three curses but also the sui po (year breaker) and the poisonous 5 Yellow. Cheerful stuff. These afflictions only coincide in the South once every 36 years. And this is a South-facing house, I notice, as I climb out of my car onto the muddy lane.
In this Rat year, the instructions on the box are to avoid disturbing the South. So houses facing due South call for special care. And of course as usual we must face away from the opposite direction, the tai sui this year at due North. Kim’s maisonette is exactly on this axis and the building is divided up oddly, I notice.
Kim has the ground floor and her neighbour the upstairs but the garden is a jigsaw puzzle. She owns the back path; he has the front garden. There is almost no open space that belongs to her. This unnecessary chaos suggests things right away: trauma, lack of clarity, the need to walk on eggshells. The sun is bright but the wind makes me shiver.
The configuration is not all bad: the neighbour’s front door in the South leads directly up to his apartment and effectively shields her from this year’s problems. Given how her recent life has been, as it turns out, this is just as well.
Afflictions are both physical and not physical. They are both outcomes and they are lessons. When a feng shui master says you will contract a plague of boils if you sit in a particular location, he is both saying break out the calamine and pay attention to where you should be and to what you should be doing. I don’t think the universe ever tells us to roll over and die; it simply asks for closer attention.
I generally aim to emphasise this.
One lady emailed recently to remonstrate about my annual Animal Year Fortunes. I had given, she said, the Sheep a bad deal. I looked back at what I had written which suggested the Sheep was in for a challenging but very satisfying time: a year of growth and learning at the price of some discomfort. The Sheep needs to listen to the lessons unfolding. Her email said to me she was probably not that keen to listen.
Kim is a masseuse who has recently qualified in Neuro Linguistic Programming. She feels that healing people with more subtle stuff is a natural progression from slapping them around. She has called me in because her life has been in turmoil and in this her 40th year, she wants a fresh start.
“Girl-friends not playing nicely with you?” I ask as I walk in.
I can say this because the door to this South-facing house is in the West where lives the por kwan or poison tongue. On December 31st she tells me, she was abandoned around 9pm by her friends to bring the New Year in alone; a tacky end to a tacky year.
“That’s horrible,” I say. Even at 40, there are times we are just children picked on in the playground.
“It was,” she says flatly. There is enormous upset behind this. I can feel it in my chest; much more than the story deserves. Often such upset will move to poignance at a touch; not this.
Gossip has contributed to the recent break-up of a 5-year relationship. He was an unreliable distant bloke, the second in succession.
There is more.
She is an effortlessly fit woman with a perfect figure and a lovely face but her skin is a little blemished.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” she says. “Straight from pimples to wrinkles.”
The South of course rules the skin, the heart and the blood.
“We’ll see what we can do about that.”
Because the South is blocked in by the neighbour’s door, the tai chi or heart of the home, is deprived of light. Like perhaps, her skin and certainly like her heart. This is early morning and these January weeks are the dawn of the year but there is a darkness in the house that is not entirely to do with a lack of sunshine. I prescribe a mirror and lighting at the tai chi; not an easy calculation on the North-South axis.
We inspect her bedroom. It is in the North East. I’m not too happy with this. The North East is traditionally the Ghost Gate, where the woo-woo™ comes in. What enters through the gate varies and it can actually be a rather good place to sleep because its qualities are withdrawal and stillness. But not in this house. This room holds the 7:9 stars which speak of an insecurity which could be bottomless. There is indeed woo-woo here: a restless sort of rippling. Not uncomfortable but never still.
“On the other hand,” I tell her, “This room would lend itself to subtle healing such as NLP. It’s an ideal treatment room.”
Currently she treats in the South West, which is the place of the mother. Someone is working extra-hard to not feel something. Usually busy-ness means something is being avoided. Swap the rooms we may loosen it up.
She makes tea; I get her ba zi out. It has been puzzling me. She has studied some feng shui and is familiar with the afflictions , full details of which by the way, follow hot on the heels of this diary entry.
We talk ba zi. The palace sai (or death) appears in the characters that represent her thirties. Sometimes these palaces are literal, sometimes not. Elementally the character would normally be interpreted as a male child. I explain the levels of meaning without drawing conclusions. I’m less intent on impressing her with my cleverness than on approaching this agony that hangs in the air.
She stops me: “There was a death,” she says. “An important death.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“I lost a son,” she says blankly. “He was fifteen. Six years ago.”
She may well be able to tell me exactly how many days it has been. I lost a sister to eclampsia at 32 and my daughter-in-law gave birth to her beautiful full-formed full-term dead baby in 2004. I saw my mother’s and father’s pain and I live with my son’s. Some days he just stares into the middle distance and it’s clear where he has gone. I know of nothing harder to deal with.
Duncan hanged himself. There is a tale of substance abuse and unsuitable partners. She has been beating herself up all this time.
“I neglected him. I’d be out and I’d say I have to go but I wouldn’t go. I let him smoke dope in the house. I thought I was cool.” Her eyes are wild and quite dry. She can install a phobia cure at the blink of an eye but she has never once cried.
“He had beautiful skin,” she says.
I remember her words about her skin and write myself a mental memo.
“I found a note,” she tells me. “Would you like to see it?” Her tone is matter-of-fact, mine too.
“Sure.”
“It fell off while my ex was thumping the fridge.”
“Distraught huh?”
“You could say that.”
“He wasn’t Duncan’s father?”
“No.”
There is a volume between these last few lines.
“It fell out from behind a fridge magnet.”
She passes me a postcard. On one side is a subtropical holiday vista: palm trees, sun, carefree tourists. The other side reads: “Gotta go now: it’s been a lovely life. See you soon.”
“Took a lot of courage to grow through with it,” she says.
Her eyes are less wild and still dry. I suggest she breathes deeply; right into the feeling. She complies. This alone takes extraordinary courage. Sometimes I stop to consider how much of themselves people trust me with. Not too often or I might lose my nerve.
As we work through the ba zi, the story it tells becomes darker and darker. Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, co-dependency, a lexicon of poor choices. But her spirit is so strong. She wants so badly to move through it. There is something in her eye as she tells me. And a strong wave of that same dismal giddiness.
“It’s all a dream,” I remind her and pat the apparently solid wall. “Quantum physics tells us that given sufficient time, this wall will turn into a hot dog. There’s nothing really here. And that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. That is what reality amounts to. We comfort ourselves with the solidity of walls and stuff because if we actually think about it we know that we are on an imaginary ball of mud spinning in darkness. It’s all a dream. We make it up as we go along. That appears to be what reality is. And if we are dreaming it makes sense to have a good one, don’t you think?”
She is almost still.
“He’s here isn’t he?” I ask, hairs rising on the back of my neck.
She nods.
“In your bedroom?”
Another nod.
“And in here?”
“Do you talk to him?”
“All the time.”
I work in the world of metaphors. I have no view on what an inexplicable noise or a pervading feeling actually is. That’s not my job. I deal with energies, some healthy, some not. Energies are not good or bad; they are either degenerating or regenerating. And as I look at her, I know in a flash what a comfort it would be in her position to believe what she believes. And how a life could be spent holding onto that.
Almost incidentally I arrange the triad of Rat, Monkey and Dragon so as to harness the Northern chi without rattling the Rat’s cage. This involves water outside on the one square metre we can safely use which happens to be in the Monkey position and having her tv in the South East at the Dragon. The back of the house of course, sits at the Rat. And I notice that the East, the Eldest Son is under a wall. Buried.
She talks rapidly and fidgets and this stuff, this feeling, hovers like a little cloud. She is quite familiar with it, him, the woo-woo stuff, whatever.
She has plans. She wants to study, to get better at what she does. She wants to give more both through her hands and in other ways. But there is this stuff in the way.
It’s comforting stuff; it tells her something survives. Or that she is bonkers or obsessed and it survives at the cost of moving on. He is forever fifteen years old and she is forever looking back. Sharing that half life with him or believing that she does – take your pick – is so comforting.
Jackson Browne’s “Too Many Angels” is playing in my head : “The moment has preserved them from the ravages of time.”
I don’t know what happens beyond the grave. I know I am and that therefore I survive. And I know there is somewhere that we came from, a place to which we belong and to which we return. But like you and like Kim and like everybody else including those, I think, who claim greater knowledge, I know no more than that.
I tell her that one Christmas I was doing a radio phone-in and a guy told me about a waking dream in which he had spoken with his recently-dead parents. They were celebrating the festive season and there was a new Morecambe and Wise Show. Did I think he was bonkers?
“Who am I to say that?”
I rather liked the idea actually: Eric and Ernie still celebrating Yuletide with the annual Special. Nice.
But Duncan’s personal survival is essential to Kim. It is what has kept her going, cleaned her up, put the bad-news partners out the door, trained her in a variety of disciplines, put her in a position to afford me. And the knowledge that we return to something and that returning puts all that appears to have happened meanwhile into context is unsatisfying. It’s not what we’re looking for. We want the lost one as they were. And I don’t know it is not an option. Why not? With the slim reservation expressed above, I just don’t know: period.
But she has never cried.
Not that tears of themselves are always meaningful. Often however, they mean we have passed through something.
“I want so badly to move on,” she says.
“I know,” I say gently.
I tell her about some clients whose one-year-old son died after a long illness. On the morning of the funeral the vicar explained to them that they could relax because it was all part of God’s plan. He was lucky to escape with his own life. He was right of course but at that moment, who gives a damn?
This is what is up for her to let go of. Her one last shred of comfort. That he is there, that she can talk to him. That he has not, like his sad little body dissolved. That they will for certain meet again.
“I don’t know you won’t,” I say. “But I don’t know you will either.”
“But to hope for it keeps me attached?”
“Exactly. We let go, things come to us. But it’s hard to do it on that condition.”
I suggest she looks in a mirror. Already she has shed years and her skin has gained tone.
“Took a lot of courage,” she repeats.
“Of course it did,” I say.
“He’s not coming back is he?” she says.
“I don’t think so.”
And she cries.
Richard Ashworth © 2008
Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.
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