Wednesday August 8th 2007 06.29
Melting Monkey
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Wednesday August 8th 2007 06.29
Hour Day Month Year
fire wood earth fire
ding chia wu ding
muw xu shen hai
rabbit dog monkey pig
Month: wu shen the earth Monkey
Solar Fortnight: Lap chow Autumn Begins
Melting Monkey
Appropriately this holiday time, the silly season of August, is the Monkey month. I’m not off just yet; actually I’m going to Shipley in Yorkshire (which does not sound like a glamorous destination) to see Ann. This involves six hours on the train in each direction as well as four changes.
Now the rains are gone the sunflowers don’t look so critical and the cacti are regaining their prickle. Even at 5am, in the conservatory there is at last bright light worth controlling and the droseras are starting to flower. As I leave I notice one has caught a bluebottle. Just nature, I guess but I want to pat the little plant on the back.
“What do you think of the feng shui here?”asks the nice American lady at Godalming Station coffee kiosk as I buy my latte. She has seen me in the Sunday Times. Somebody reads broadsheets then. She does sell them of course.
It’s a good question. Her business has lasted longer than any I have seen. Cannily she closes promptly so as to get the sandwich trade and still not pay staff for the afternoon Spotting that there is no cash machine, she promotes her cash-back facility. In feng shui terms though, I think it is because the shop opens out onto the ticket hall which forms a nice clear ming tang (or open space) for the chi to settle. Station kiosks usually face onto rushing trains which offer little chance to hold the chi. Master Chan Kun Wah taught that although there was boundless chi to draw off a railway line, it was only practical at a station. I think he was holding back and I haven’t yet concluded exactly what. Still; interesting question and I’m glad she asked it.
The train takes me to Guildford where I can catch one direct to Manchester Piccadilly
As I board that, my Blackberry buzzes. Email; from last night I imagine. It is Nadine.The Flying Stars (that is the temporary energies in her house) suggested that her younger daughter was in trouble. She has investigated and found that the little girl is quite unhappy in all sorts of ways she had not suspected.. Seems we were just in time. Full marks to her for taking the advice on and risking upset. Many of us would rather not know these things. Children are of course God’s way of keeping us anxious. But then again anxiety is God’s way of letting us know we are not alone.* What worse pain is there than worrying about our children? We have taken measures to relieve this and meanwhile Nadine and the family are off on holiday with at least a rationale for her recent anxiety.
The train whizzes out of Banbury and I try to pick out the field where Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Festival will soon take place as I know it is visible from the railway. No, the countryside all looks the same.
Judging by her ba zi, Ann is quite obsessive, practising what I call “moral self-harm,” constant self-beating up. She has told me she has the neighbours from hell as well as health stuff going on. The house has been on the market a while and just won’t sell. My experience is that neighbours from hell often feel at home because the location is itself pretty infernal. We’ll see. Selling a house is not usually that much of a trick.
It’s the Monkey month, as I said and the Monkey is metal while the ambient August chi is of course fire; fire attacks metal and the outcome is mischief. Antisocial neighbours are a typical example. That and road rage and gun crime and escalation in Iraq; all manner of bonkersness. And as I said, this is a reflection; of me, of you, of everybody, in so far as there is an “everybody”..
Under the Monkey, the US stockmarket, panicked by mortgage foreclosures, has had a disastrous time. Many feng shui masters (among them Raymond Lo and Tan Khoon Yong) predicted a property meltdown early in August and this has been a feature of my commissioned year forecasts since January#. It’s nice to be right but I could stand to be wrong about human misfortune. Again a reflection of course.
On the seat opposite me a pretty girl about the same age as my twin daughters Jess and Hen, frowns at what I am writing.
“Is that Chinese?”
“Certainly is.”
“Are you fluent?” she asks excitedly.
“I write the couple of hundred characters I know pretty rapidly but by Chinese standards that still makes me an idiot,” I tell her.
She is off to a festival where doubtless, like my daughters, she will not wash for several days. She is impressed that I like Razorlight and Patrick Wolf but how could I not? To resist these or Fallout Boy would be as practical in my house as silencing the dishwasher.
About this time of year I start to consider my annual forecasts. These will go out to my mailing list around the end of December. Such predictions are based on the nature of the year. A Fire Pig being an uneasy amalgam of water and fire, is inherently unstable and this means the Monkey month is simultaneously drained by water and attacked by fire. Which conveniently explains floods in the South West and North East as well as market collapse in August. This Pig year was always going to be wet.
Actually the North East is the place to watch in the 8 Fate (1996-2016) but the North East of what? Understandably people often ask if such-and-such is to happen to the North East, where are we orienting from? The shallow traditional and rather unsatisfying answer is the Great Pyramid which makes sense of Russia’s growing puckishness. A more useful but more gnomic one is “Wherever I am.” The foot and mouth outbreak puts Godalming at the centre of the universe which is a bit unnerving as it’s exactly where I am most days of the week..
* Not that I’m suggesting any literal sort of God. I’ve read Richard Dawkins and I now know better.
# Personalised ones are available by arrangement at enormous cost.
The Hexagram from the Book of Changes, ruling this quarter (from midsummer to the autumn equinox) is Number 33 Dun, Retreat. My predictions suggested this implied withdrawal from the Middle East which has not happened. At the risk of making myself perversely right, I stand by that interpretation; there is a high price to be paid for resistance to the Tao. Right living seems to involve going with the flow unless we know better. Not the reverse. Is George Bush an 8-foot lizard? Only David Icke knows for sure.
The train pulls into Shipley, I am picked up by Mark, as agreed, in his green Zafira. Frankly I can’t tell a Zafira from a Zoroastrian but there is the name on the bonnet. He’s a nice cheerful bloke obviously concerned about his wife and his stepsons.
Ann appears fragile but she is a powerful good-hearted woman. Mark, somewhat younger is that rare treasure, a man who can be trained. Few men grow up, some women don’t and one of the greatest gifts a man can receive is instruction from a wise woman who loves him. I had no inkling of this until I was 30 or so by the way and I resisted it resolutely as Sheila, my wife will confirm. Mark isn’t resistant which is a good sign; he is loving and respectful in a way that I have no choice but to admire.
Ann’s two little boys both of whom have fabulous flame-red hair, are good blokes too. Their ba zi’s suggest serious alienation from their natural father and Kevin’s Big Fate (derived from the ba zi) is changing about now. It is his wellbeing (about which I am pretty confident) that concerns me. Ann tells me he has been feeling change in the air. Devoted is not a strong enough word for how she feels about her menfolk.
The front drive is shared.
“Territorial issues,” I think and the next-door neighbour turns out to be bloodyminded as only Yorkshire neighbours can be; not a tearaway but a hectoring middle-aged man who has a habit of standing on the shared drive staring through Ann’s front room window. I place a goy moon (a Chinese jiu shape) along the appropriate wall. I have known psychopathic neighbours turn to pussycats in hours after placing one of these. Ann questions the positioning and she’s right, so I move it a yard.
I check outside. The land slopes away unhealthily. The whole estate is oddly still. There used to be a mine underneath apparently and the dragon of the land is clearly miffed. It is as if it were a pet dog who has enjoyed neither a walk nor a good combing in a generation.. There is unsettled woo-woo™ stuff all over this modern house which is unusual. I can feel aches and pains not limited to those of the family. There is a stoical long-suffering distress here: Ann has been terrorised by her ex-in-laws as well as the neighbours. Again these things reflect ourselves but the more fragile we are the less we may want to hear it. Ann doesn’t but she listens. Mark too. What she needs I tell her, is to trust. Without that she will be forever fearful. I move Mark’s desk to a more commanding position.
Ann and Mark’s pillows are under one of those overhead chests of drawers. I recommend they get out from under it if with purchasers coming round, they can’t remove it. With one of these you can pretty much assume preoccupation and broken sleep.
I recommend changes. My priority is getting the house sold but there’s more needed here. With mumbo-jumbo I energise the street up to the drive. Then I use a few tricks to help the sale: one is to paint the house number red to draw the eye from afar. We’ll see.
Home of the Braves
On the way home from Shipley I listen to Elvis Costello on my i-pod. “Alison” is the song. It always touches me; not the wordplay so much as the tenderness. A puzzling figure Elvis Costello: responsible for the most strikingly perceptive lyrics of his generation and the least intelligible singing manner. Why would you write such great words in order to have them made incomprehensible by an affected sub-Mississipi drawl? He wanted to be known for the wordplay but not unmasked for the tenderness, I think..
Men! What do you do?
The Blackberry goes again. I’m not keen on mobile phones, the constant use of which is analogous to basting your frontal lobes through the ears but having my Blackberry on while I travel – keeping it at arm’s length – allows me to handle emails on the move. I can at least delete those that invite me to enhance my physical assets (how do they know?) and handle the easy ones before I get home.
It is Cherilyn who has emailed. She is for reasons which will become clear, from Oklahoma but her ancient mother lives in Florida and she was brought up in Mexico City. She never wants to return to the USA; they don’t like people there, she tells me.
Cherilyn’s husband has recently died. At 94 he had a good innings – as if that makes it any easier – but what had been distressing her so over his last few weeks was the unremitting pain he had been in. The medics seem to believe, she tells me, that the old either don’t feel pain or are not worth relieving from it. I have done my best to be a comfort during this time.
Having read the email, I call her.
Cherilyn is urbane, smart, educated and a full-blood Cherokee. I’m not sure whether that makes her a Native American, First National, Aborigine, Indigene or what these days. We have been corresponding since she read my book back in February. She is a quaint mix of the wide-open innocence I associate with the Native Americans I have known – none of whom gave a damn about terminology by the way – and the sophisticated seeker after truth she has spent 64 years becoming. Sometimes her emails and her conversation go in a non-linear direction that it takes careful attention to follow.
Naively she believes having read my book that she knows me. But the fact is she does.
“I like your wife,” whom she has never met, she says and there is no question from the way she speaks about Sheila that she does indeed know who she is.
She is she says, on the edge of the abyss. I understand, I think. For all of us there is a well of feelings we try not to have. For some this is a full-time occupation. The Native American generally arrives I think, equipped with a package of close-to-unbearable feelings. More of them die young, become alcoholics and suffer sexual abuse than any other racial grouping in the world. Cherilyn is a remarkable woman and to characterise her as rent-an-Injun is as offensive as ignoring her but nonetheless she has much of the expected luggage
As a rule I advise that we feel our feelings. This is how we move. The human condition seems to consist of lessons wrapped up in what we call negative emotions. We feel and we learn. We don’t feel and we stay stuck. I don’t know why and I’m generally pretty suspicious of anyone who claims they do. I’m about to advise her to feel her feelings and I hear in my head exactly what I’m about to say. I suddenly understand exactly what that might include and shudder. So easy for me with my package of middle-class resentments.
“Ask for help,” I suggest. “There may be no need to feel this all the way through. It is a high level of spiritual practice but it is appropriate when we can go no further, to ask for help. Help is always there. When we’ve done our best and can go no further we may even be entitled. Not that being entitled has much to do with it.”
She mutters agreement and tells me more about the doctors who have been hurting her husband of 40 years.
A little background:.
In 1838, the State of Georgia enforced the Treaty of New Echota which authorised the removal of 17,000 Cherokees to Oklahoma 2,200 miles away. The Treaty had never been accepted by the majority of Cherokee.
As Forest Carter put it:
The government soldiers came and told them to sign the paper. Told them the paper meant that the new white settlers would know where they could settle and where they woud not take the land of the Cherokee. And after they had signed it, more government soldiers come with guns and long knives fixed on their guns. The soldiers said the paper had changed its words.*
“The pain,” I remind her, “is not in feeling but in not feeling. Mostly we try not to feel because we believe that it will be worse than the non-feeling we maintain with coffee, alcohol, drugs and soap-operas. Pretty much anything can be used as a distraction.”
“I think if I go over the edge I’ll never come back.”
“Ask for help.”
This is a widely-read woman who effortlessly recommends erudite obscure literature.And this is a Cherokee.
So the Cherokees were herded westwards. They walked, facing front, making no contact with their armed escort, refusing to ride because they wanted to be given nothing. On the trail, the young, the old and the sick started to fall and the soldiers only allowed them to bury their dead once every three days. The Cherokee would not put their dead on horses or in wagons, so they carried them: mothers, wives, dead sons and daughters. And they never cried. It was the onlookers who called it the Trail of Tears. Around a third of the Cherokee died.
She cannot, Cherilyn says, go there. I do not know whether this is her abyss or my romantic European projection. What I know is that this woman has extraordinary spiritual gifts. She suspects psychedelic mushrooms will take her where she needs to go. Who am I to tell her she is wrong? What do I know? I offer to accompany her to the abyss.
As it happens Godalming is famous for four things: Genesis, the first electric streetlights, Jack Phillips of Titanic fame and General James Oglethorpe who founded the State of Georgia. Yup it’s the centre of the universe this month.
So until next fortnight, keep a smile on your lips, a song in your heart and a spring in your onion.
Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..
Richard Ashworth