Friday September 8th 2006 03.24
Bak Low – White Dew
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Friday September 8th 2006 03.24
Hour Day Month Year
earth metal fire fire
wu geng ding bing
yin tse yuw xu
tiger rat rooster dog
Month: ding yuw the Fire Rooster.
Solar Fortnight: Bak Low White Dew
The Hills are Alive
David is Scottish, Britt is Austrian. They’re in London working out how to break up their London pied-a-terre into flats. He’s an interior designer, she has a mind like a Tag Heuer. He is drafting when I arrive while she explains exactly how the financing works. So far so good.
They had picked up my ba gua mirror booklet* “Don’t Point That Thing at Me” in Viktorija Kovalenko’s World of Feng Shui shop in Whiteleys of Bayswater and called me in to perform what I expected to be a straightforward domestic feng shui survey. I knew nothing of their improvement plans until I arrived.
So, wrong-footed from the off.
The problem is that the place is not meant to be divided up. This is one of a terrace of town houses that appear H-shaped from the air. Because it is an irregular shape, great chunks of chi are missing. Furthermore if it were divided up, the top flat would have no exit and the tai chi (or heart of the house) of the lower flat, is in the toilet. Actually in the bowl. Which is unusual but the metaphor requires little elaboration.
Doesn’t look promising. I question what I am seeing. After all I have a brief now.
Then they tell me they plan to build at the rear in the gap. I orient myself and realise the gap is in the North West. Well good idea; a missing North-West is a basic no-no. There is no solidity, no authority with Qian empty. The Father is absent.
*Available by email if you want one.
On the other hand the North West is where xu, the Dog of this Fire Dog year, can be found. This is the tai sui. The tai sui, that is the direction of the year animal, is the one place to absolutely not touch under any circumstances. Especially not to build an extension. The fundamental rule is no messing with foundations. This year the tai sui is in the first segment of the North West. So no digging there. Worse: the proposed addition stretches into the next segment which belongs to Hai, the Pig who will rule 2007. That area could be dug this year but not next. This is getting sticky.
I wander around. The lower rear bedroom which sticks out next to the missing piece is exposed and cold. And there is powerful loneliness here. I am overwhelmed by the empty room. Tears come to my eyes. Someone is very far from home. The feeling hangs in the air.
I enquire. An Australian girl, fresh from Oz, has just moved in.
Then at the front I notice that a chunk of the South East sticks out unnaturally. They have converted a coal hole into a toilet stroke shower room. They have already told me they have just one child, a teenage daughter and the South East represents her. Britt’s ba zi (or personal feng shui) had suggested she was tall, beautiful and fragile and she turns out to be all three, the feng shui now explaining (if that is the word) the fragility. The Eldest Daughter is exposed like the jutting coal hole. Stickier still.
Britt tells me she is glad to be regaining her freedom after all these years but her feelings are mixed. Her daughter, she tells me, is “attached”. Who is the more attached: her or her daughter? I ask.
The mixed feelings are not only about the daughter. Missing at the South is a great chunk which if included would hold the yuen hom (temporary energy or Flying Star)numbers 3:5 which are often divined “Clever Man.” This along with the uncooperative Dog tells me why the project is no-go. Husband with lost vote.
“Have you found that you just miss opportunities?” I ask him. “You do okay but the big jobs slip through your fingers? Does everybody seem to be making money except you?”
I am reading from David’s ba zi now. The trick with a ba zi is to find what makes it unbalanced. Some are too strong, some too weak. Not that weak is bad any more than strong is good; what we seek is balance. And because this imbalance is expressed in terms of too much or too little of an element, generally we can do something about it. If there is too little wood say, we add wood and so on. David’s ba zi has a distinctive pattern of weak day stem (the chi of the specific day of birth) surrounded by choi. For a man, choi means both money and wife. In other words, a weak day stem implies battles in both areas. For a woman, choi only means money which is more straightforward. Sometimes it’s hard being a bloke.
It turns out he has been designing palaces for Sheikhs which has been frustrating: surrounded by vast opulence but with little opportunity for wealth of their own. He and Britt believe that the flat conversion may be their last chance to make serious money. Talented, fit, creative and still in their early 50’s, I don’t see why. Neither do their ba zis or indeed the house which conceals a series of exploitable money spots. Furthermore there are many who would say that this real estate even as it stands, together with their other assets, constitutes serious wealth. Not by oil-well standards, I guess.
David says he had no idea feng shui could be about people in places rather than just about places. That’s not uncommon – many students think at first that feng shui is another word for interior decoration. This has driven many a feng shui master bandy.
I can see David’s drafting; he is certainly a clever man. Their ideas are seductively good. Britt asks me a series of questions which amount to attempts to outwit the tai sui.
I lay it on the line. This project won’t work. I can try to shoe horn it into some sort of shipshape or I can concentrate on what matters which is clearly their relationship.
To their credit they recognise the truth when they hear it.
Britt’s ba zi says she is at a crossroads in relationship. Her day stem which is reckoned to be the “master” of a ba zi, is in the palace of mo yuk, whose significance is something like “washing dirty linen in public.” I ask about this. There is a pause.
David says he can’t do anything right anymore. All along he has shown the uncertain bonhomie of a man walking on hot bricks. Britt is recently back from a big workshop in the US. She wants David to go on one too, she says and he wants some of what she came back with. But she is taking no prisoners. I have seen Britt’s fresh merciless wakefulness so many times: self-awareness is so close to self-righteousness. To her great credit she hears me when I point this out.
When we return jacked up and glazed-over from a workshop, session or retreat, we are wise not to be too attached to the euphoria. This too will pass. Yes the changes that you now see clearly must come about, will come about. Your fresh vision will see to that. But it has little to do with your feelings.They will still come and go. Best bet is to stop labelling some“good” and others “bad.”
We talk around the issues laid bare by the ba zi’s and the feng shui. It is demanding on all three of us. Britt and David are constantly one step from cat and dog. They are brave and open. He sees that he takes refuge in always being wrong while she recognises her determination to be fed-up. These issues are reflected in the very bricks within which we sit. Three hours pass.
Just as the sun is setting, I call a halt. Yang feng shui is a daylight activity; after sunset feng shui serves the dead. I am in any case fengshui’d out. I say:
“So you, Britt, have to weigh up the value of being at one with the universe with the value of resentment.”
She smiles the “busted” smile as I mime a pair of scales with my hands.
“And you, David, have to decide whether you want a grounded responsive joyful woman or to be a victim.”
Seems clear to me.
We talk about their big self-build in Austria.
Would I go over there and do a regular survey?
“Absolutely,” I say.
“You do do them, then?” says David.
Feedback is encouraged including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case.
Richard Ashworth
If this is not quite enough for you, my voice is featured on myspiritradio. Programmes change monthly.
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Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
Names have been changed to protect everybody.