Sunday May 6th 2007 06.01
lap ha – Summer Begins
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Sunday May 6th 2007 06.01
Hour Day Month Year
earth metal wood fire
ji geng yi ding
muw tze si hai
rabbit rat snake pig
Month: yi si the wood Snake
Solar Fortnight: lap ha Summer Begins
Head in the Clouds
Rain is slashing down. There is water everywhere I look. At the foot of the garden the stream is swollen and beyond that the river is close to bursting. The noise of the drains at night is overpowering.
The stems and branches of the moment this fortnight opened (above) predicted flooding. Hai the Pig which rules the entire year, is of the water element, as is tze the Rat and ding, geng and yi (above in the stems) can easily make further water. As metal is drained by water so it is melted by fire.
The Earth is two-thirds water. In the Chinese system, it of course means a lot more than damp. Water is both the extreme of yang, ever-moving and all-pervasive and of yin: a single subtly-joined body sitting at a single level all over the world. Water is generally understood to stand for communication, routine, cycles, repetition, darkness and cold. When there is too much, when a house or a person is unbalanced by excess water, there is a clogging stuckness, often deep sadness. The literal meaning of feng shui being “wind and water,” many think that water is always a good idea but we are dealing in balance; too much is too much.
So when a person’s ba zi (personal feng shui, based on date of birth) shows too much water I expect a certain darkness. If the house is also out of kilter, there will often be communication problems that can lead to depression, obsession and sulks.
A James Blunt song is wailing on my i-tunes shuffle as I write; now that’s water! How did that get there? This is not music I can listen to every day.
Although I don’t see it until morning, Susan emails me in the small hours of the night. At
“Is it the house?” the message asks.
“Could be,” I respond. “Is there stagnant water nearby, odd shapes, over-close trees?”
All of the above are possibilities. She asks me to look at the house, this week while her husband is still away and emails me her date of birth so I can prepare. I shuffle my diary and draft a basic ba zi.
The morning is wet; the night has been wetter. Outside the lawn is getting out of control. Water produces wood; rain makes the grass grow. Wood is drawn out by fire; so now we need the fire of the sun. Zusu, our Collie-cross, grumbles because she can not run in the garden
Of the ten central characters of Susan’s ba zi, six are water. This is very distinctive. Most ba zis are unbalanced but this is extraordinary. What does it mean?
I walk Zusu down by the river while I think. Zusu, named for the little girl with the petals in It’s a Wonderful Life, loves to fetch a ball. I throw, she brings it back; I throw, she brings it back. I brainwashed her as a puppy when we had a tiny garden. I throw, you bring it back. And she has an infallible sense of smell. However deep the ball lies in the nettles, she’ll find it. On the other hand she is likely to hang onto the ball while she relieves herself, just in case I throw it without her.
The path is tacky and my boots slip as I walk.
Too much water can also indicate nagging, persuasion, verbal domination and the repetitive arguments that lead to silence. As Susan’s self is a weak yin metal and metal of course is the element that is drained by water, the flood suggests huge demands being made on her.
The position of each character in a ba zi is called a palace and each has meaning. Where the excess of water appears is in the palaces of Susan’s ba zi that correspond to the family she grew up with. Her parents especially her father, appear to have been difficult . But there is also water in the husband palace. She is awash.
A huge marine bird has settled where Zusu and I walk. In a break between showers, it cruises silently like a pterodactyl twenty or so feet over our heads and above the ducks and moorhens, The perch and tench keep down. Even the otters are cautious.
Water gets everywhere. In Susan’s ba zi it implies random demands made upon a little girl. It looks deranged, very controlling; as if she were brought up with rules that were both inconsistent and inflexible. There may have been bullying, hysteria, blackmail, even violence. This is what the father palace looks like. And the husband palace. He is likely to be pedantic, over-certain. No hiding place. She will be quite desperate. And indeed she is.
I imagine her alone in the quiet of this big place at
In bright daylight I arrive at her doorstep and get a feel for the enormity of the whole thing. As I apply my luopan to her front door, I start to see what is going on. It faces South East. Her home comprises the
One of the most straightforward ways to assess a house is by comparing it to the human body. On this model the front door is the mouth, the rear fence the backbone and so on. I have lost count of the number of times I have found back complaints when a rear fence has been damaged. If we sophisticate it further, the feet may be in the East, the stomach in the South West and so on. And the
A house is not a worm that can regenerate a tail from a head. After a century it is not going to change overnight.
We talk. She has incidents to recount: how she was thrown out of her home at fifteen and fended for herself. How her father left her mother alone to die. This is particularly hard. To her enormous credit she has channeled her pain into healing, working as a counsellor three days a week.
How her husband will not let her move furniture or decorations from the positions he has decreed.
“He doesn’t even like the thing,” she says of a
“He must be very damaged,” I say.
He was sent away at nine to be educated by Jesuits. Not a great reference.
Over the
The head of the head of the head. It needs to be cleared but it is not going to happen; at least not yet.
What chance has he had, this very controlling man by whose bedside is a crucifix that must not even be dusted? And it is not as if Susan has no control button herself. Our conversation reveals a certain unbending in her too. This is the tao.
“Why do I have to do all the work?” she moans understandably. The question is its own answer.
She is very courageous to admit it. It is simply that in the armwrestle that her relationship has become, someone had to give and it seems to have been her. She fits an archetype sometimes called the wounded healer; sometimes I’m not sure there is any other sort..
There is so much to be done and so little that is likely to get done about the feng shui of the house that I stick with soul work, the human chi, for longer than usual. There is no point recommending rococco cures for him to object to. At least not yet.
“Why does he get the sympathy?”
“Because you are up to doing something about it and on his own he isn’t.”
The head , the NorthWest, the father, self-righteousness are yang metal. We relieve metal with water. But this is no solution for her. What she needs is fire; that is warmth, passion, understanding, innovation. We talk for more than four hours before we alter anything. It is unusual for an entire survey to take that long. She is a brave woman and I tell her so.
“It’s much easier for me to say this clever stuff than for you to hear it.”
“Well, thank you.”
It may be greater to give than to receive. It’s also much easier.
She is so tired and she so craves warmth and acknowledgement. For now there are crystals and some tinkering with colours. We can do more as things develop and in a very unbalanced house, a slight change can be very effective. She will check in by email as things happen
I return. I walk by the river. Zusu won’t give the ball back. She is thirsty from the running. She enters the river with the ball in her mouth but she won’t let it go so she can only let the water slowly enter her mouth. She can not lap – in case she loses the ball. Eventually she gets out, shakes off the moisture and returns it to me.
Meanwhile back at St Johns Wood, Sammy has a bladder complaint and has asked me in to ascertain whether the house could be the culprit. When I arrive he is in clear distress, upset and fidgetty. More water. I drop everything to talk.
It is clear that his distress is deeper and wider-ranging than a urinary infection. The metaphor suggests, if you will, that he is pissed-off; just as another client of mine with vasculitis (inflamed veins) suffers from bad blood. I expect the house to tell me more and indeed the ba zi has already: “You’ve had three separate careers,” I tell him. It is correct: he trained then practised as an accountant, worked as a journalist for more than a decade and now is underemployed after five years of property speculation leading to the wealth around me. He believes he is the victim of an allergic reaction to something in the house or possibly the house itself. He fills me in on both sets of symptoms with unflinching precision. He knows too much about all this. He wears the symptoms like medal; as if they define him. This sort of morbid pride is not a good start. I think he is a very bored man. Alerted by the accuracy of the ba zi, he starts to ask me questions as if interviewing a rather dim au pair:
“So you’re saying that if a house is the wrong shape or facing the wrong way, it will affect me?”
I actually avoid words like “affecting.” That sort of logical structure tends to fall down if you’re recommending people wear Tiger amulets or sleep in different directions.
“Something like that.”
“And if I change it, that affects me too?”
“Change the house, you change the person.”
He starts to argue that either one thing causes another or it doesn’t. I suggest that since he has no idea why he is ill he’d be better off not being so certain. No diagnosis to date: medical, homoeopathic or alternative has proved useful. He is tempted by geopathic stress though. It’s just close enough to scientific to be convincing. He may get to the bottom of it this way but the risk is that once you are specific – geopathic stress, allergy, carcinoma – you’re stuck with it. Paradox is so much more flexible.
“Change the house, you change the person.”
The discussion takes 3 hours; I hear a great deal about his life, triumphs and mistakes and gently tell him more from the ba zi. He is so tired after the exertions of making his fortune. He has had to be smart, single-minded and tenacious over a long period. Not easy stuff . It’s as if for years his whole body was clenched and now he has unclenched and can’t stay focused anymore. These phases pass. He’ll move and shake again when the time is right but now there is little time left to survey his big detached house. Enough though to establish that his son is being routinely bullied and there is a wild dripping drain in what I suspect my Chinese reference books will say is dangerous. I will have to consult the Water Dragon Classic which is among the most complicated things I do. His wife is visibly distressed about her son.
Every Saturday he goes and hangs with his mates. Every Saturday he comes back robbed of something: i-pod, cash, phone.
“Should we move?”
I say I don’t know yet but I do suggest he should relocate his wheeling and dealing to a different part of the home as his office is dark and poorly-positioned. We are out of time. I explain that having answered his distress call, I will need to come back; there remain considerable calculation and drafting to do if he wants me to answer his question: He is keen that I should. We agree a date for the second visit
It is a long walk to the tube. “God’s Great Banana Skin” by Chris Rea is on my i-pod.
“Don’t you never think nobody’s better than you,” sings the burly Geordie minstrel. He appears to have come up with the central flaw in the Divine Plan but on closer listening the pitfall in question may simply be the confusing syntax of the triple negative.
There is no authoritative translation of the extraordinarily complex formulae of the Water Dragon. This mediaeval material derives originally from GrandMaster Yang Yung Song, a proto-feng shui man of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) but was codified and officially adopted by the Qianlong Emperor in 1739. It consists of complex rules about where water is held and released. I usually compare two editions which unhelpfully often disagree. Not in Sammy’s case though.
He rings five times over the next few days to question whether I will charge him for the second visit. I confirm I will. He changes the date by email. I am booked solid weeks ahead but I go along with him.
I draft a map of his house – this alone is a morning’s work – and then consult the Water Dragon which shows that the rogue drain implies “Children being exploited.” I am actually surprised as I had expected to find a solution to his waterworks problems; the metaphor seemed inevitable. Back to the drawing board then. Nonetheless the possibility that his son’s torment might be solved by a rerouted drain seems important enough to let him know this interim conclusion. So I do, by email. I return to my drafting and my obscure books for further answers. Then two days before the date fixed, he cancels and emails ordering me not to charge for my preparation.
A sunny day after the torrent; Zusu chases the ball down the garden until she is tongue-hanging-out bushed. Sheila and the girls come back shaken from the funeral of a small boy who died horribly. We are all involved with the family but I have taken Joey to Starbucks instead where we discussed the reign of Charles II with special attention to religious tolerance. Joey is only twelve: there is no need for him to be there. I can feel the dense grief outside the packed church when I drop the girls. We are all in tears before I drive off. The tiny coffin is in a side-car attached to a motorbike. I understand the little boy liked a good broom-broom noise. The sun shines bravely. Kind of puts Sammy into perspective.
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.
Richard Ashworth