Saturday June 23rd 2007 08.03

ha gee – Summer Solstice

Richard Ashworth Note new contact details:

Feng Shui Diaries 49, Midhurst Road, Fernhurst,

Solar fortnight beginning: Haslemere GU27 3EN

Saturday June 23rd 2007 08.03 01428.658900

Hour Day Month Year

fire earth fire fire

bing wu bing ding

shun tze wu hai

dragon rat horse pig

Month: bing wu the fire Horse

Solar Fortnight: ha gee Summer Solstice

Dominus, Domini, Domino: what’s it matter as long as it falls right?

Whoever said that feng shui is mostly common sense did not knew much about either. Putting a big stone at the back door to represent a mountain is never going to be anybody’s idea of nous. Nor is facing a grave to the South to ensure the benevolence of our ancestors. Most of what I do is irrational and that’s fine with me. It seems to work.

A good example of this is respect for the tai sui* which is the compass point at which you will find the animal that rules the year.The tai sui is reckoned the most formidable of feng shui influences and at midsummer, it is rampant. What may lead to mischief in January is serious trouble in June. The traditional instructions are to avoid facing it (this year the Northernmost third of the NorthWest) and not to disturb the earth either there or opposite at the South East. These are the positions respectively of the Pig and the Snake. Beware the Pig and the Snake. Disturb no foundations, do not dig.

Not much common sense in that.

This solar fortnight is itself named for Ha Gee, the Summer Solstice, a bonkers time; like twelve full moons all at once. And the sun, unlike the moon, is rarely subtle. You can usually expect road rage, squabbles and a certain routune nastiness. This year however, there have been goings on. Shenanigans. The predominance of fire in the pillars (above) offers a bit of an idea. Even when it’s raining everything is running a bit hot.

* Literally Great Year.

But first some good news, Sue, a comely 64-year-old widow has a new boyfriend and she emails to thank me. She reminds of our deal: if the feng shui works I want all the credit but if it doesn’t it had nothing to do with me. Her son, about whom she has been quite worried has lost one of the three stone needed to emerge from the category of high health risk. If truth were told, this was her top priority. We care about nothing as much as

about our children, do we? The house had suggested he was too much like his late father who had frankly not looked after himself. And his future may now be all his own.

Sue admonishes me for not crowing enough about my successes in these diaries and agrees to be quoted on my website. Her front door faces into the Pig as I recall, so for her fortunes to turn around this year is especially pleasing.

On cue Ingrid calls me. Her builders have been arrested for identity theft and unmentionable misdemeanours with her underwear. Her house features some very aggressive windows, pointing out at the road like the semiclad figurehead of the Cutty Sark. Before she arrived it had been home venue to the amateur priapism (look it up!) of some local celebrity. As I told her then (and reported in an earlier diary) the windows had to go and the house orientation had to change. She has small children. A house full of sex magic is inappropriate. Nonetheless she appears to have hung on Gollum-like to the windows. (“My tenants say it gives the house character.” “Couldn’t they be part of the chimney?” No no no.) And now shenanigans. I don’t use immoderate language or frighten people and I rarely speak loudly but it is a daft client who mistakes this for uncertainty or worse that the feng shui can be negotiated with. This is real stuff.

I offer to drop everything and visit her to settle all this down.

One of the changes her house needs is a sharply reangled kitchen door. Precious little common sense in that either. Lillian Too calls such a door a “castle gate” and I have watched a feng shui master work for several hours on a home and recommend nothing beyond such an eccentric doorway. I have read that they are a chic feng shui accessory. Maybe so but the correct angle – tying the door in with the other exits and entrances – is vital. Someone once told me that feng shui was a 90’s thing to which I responded that as these formulae have been working for two millennia plus they can wait for fashion to catch up.

Talking of the irrational, triple Snake and all round dog-in-the-manger Tony Blair is converting to Catholicism. The Pope reproves him for his foreign policy before offering blessing. Blair makes a practice of dealing with the top man of course but the Big G’s deputy at least is in doubt as to whether the dead in Iraq and Pakistan have been doing the Lord’s work Surely he should know?

Meanwhile in London over the midsummer weekend, six young people are killed in knife incidents. The government announces a “crackdown” on so-called honour killings just as it announced one a few weeks ago on knifings – as if it had been turning an avuncular blind eye to the little scamps but now it is going to jolly well stamp its feet. “Crackdown” is a silly insincere word from a government intent on proving how butch it is. We get the governments we choose of course.

Halfway up the Stairs

Longer term Catholic Maria, is in a bad way. She lives in the house with the single worst combination of feng shui features I have ever seen. Its back is thirty feet from the M1. After that it gets really bad. There have been occasional breaks in the clouds when we get the house to work for her but it has been hard going. She needs to face, travel and occupy the North West to pick up on the most helpful chi for her.

She has lost her job.

She is a smart, brave, exquisitely sensitive woman with immaculate taste in music. She it was who identified for me “Canto de la Terra” the Andrea Bocelli heartbreaker that I had heard in Central China in 2005 and not been able to place. Her ba zi (or personal feng shui, if you’ve only just arrived) is full of light for the future and for her, like many, the ba zi which charts destiny, is the engine room of her fortunes. The shenanigans of the bungalow are a temporary illusion, the ba zi stays with her for this incarnation.

She is Irish by blood, brought up by Sicilians in Australia. This is a confusing start and she has the not-belonging that tends to come with this territory.The lost job was working for a charity. She liked the job and loved the charity but hated her boss. We look at her choices. Nothing is random. Nothing is anything other than our wish. It just helps to be truthful about it. And few of us see this all the time. She remembers the long illness before her adopted mother died. Her father did not know what to do with her or himself. He clearly thought drinking might help and sent little Maria to be confused by nuns while he explored this option. All her choice. We look at how fortunate these hapless Latins were to have a little Celtic saint like herself pass through their lives.

Maria writes wonderful poetry. And this praise comes from someone who once refused to add his contact details to the sheet being passed around after a big workshop unless reassured that I would be sent no more bloody awful poetry. She shows me a concrete piece which looks like a staircase. She has a fabulous turn of phrase:

I want to live each day just because life is its own gift and living it is the best it ever needs to be.

I want to share my staircase, the steps leading from cussedness to asking for assistance, owning up to need.

I point out to her that the staircase image is interesting for the tenant of a bungalow. She reminds me that the stairs are going down.

She is determined to change and to make her life work.

There are tears. Most of them are hers.

Later she emails me that she has an interview for a plum job in the Western Highlands. North West. Fabulous. Fingers crossed. I am full of admiration for this brave woman.

Just as I am putting this diary to bed, Ingrid texts me. She is appalled at her unconsciousness and asks me to come to her house right away. I drive pretty much right away to Brighton. We settle the energy with some clear quartz and prayer and I talk the foreman through the reangling of the kitchen door. He is bemused but respectful. It’s hard to argue that what has taken place here is run-of-the-mill.

Ingrid and I walk out in the Brighton sunshine. We talk in a quaint beamed tearoom over a pot of Earl Gray. She has two beautiful little girls to care for with a halfhearted father apiece, menopause and an imminent operation as well as a new roof and the aforementioned auto-erotic artisans. The little girls are lively and empowered, the fathers non-contributory but she is so strong. A little too strong perhaps. In Chinese metaphysics, both too strong and too weak amount to imbalance. She needs something for herself: some time, some pampering, an interest outside. She cries with frustration. She is a brave imaginative woman in a jam; she has every right to a pocket of unconscousness.

Seagulls call aggressively: “Mine, Mine, Mine” and the people on the next table are discussing Shilpa Shetty. A moment with nothing in it.

I have squeezed her inbetween surveys. I have to leave before the pot is drained. She says she will linger.

“Good idea,” I say but I notice she steals out before I have driven away..

My super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and

my book The Feng Shui Diaries is out now!

If you’re feeling rash you can order it from:

Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books

Waterstones www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)

or indeed Tescos.

Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..

Richard Ashworth

29, Portsmouth Road, Godalming, Surrey, GU7 2JU | tel: 01483 428998 | info@imperialfengshui.info

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