5th January 2005
The birth of the New Year; It’s Curtains; Clutter; Tsunami…
Feng Shui Diaries
Siu Hohn : Slight Cold
Solar fortnight beginning
Wednesday Jan 5th 2005 13.52
Hour Day Month Year
metal earth fire wood
sun gay ding yute
may chow chow yuw
sheep ox ox rooster
The Birth of the New Year
This is a wood Rooster year, introduced by a fire ox month. For good measure, the first day of this ox month is itself an earth ox. The Ox is naturally of the earth, not much happens on an earth ox day. This ox is an especially stubborn beast and this day is designated ch’u (discard), meaning it is a day of cleansing and the daily Mansion of the Moon is chen, the Chariot, which concerns the delivery of assets from afar. This may be the flavour of the month if not the year.
These days we have the luxury of avoiding dairy products but the ox is essential to survival among many peoples. Jews, Muslims and Hindus have strict rules about oxen: what can be used in what way, what eaten and what touched and when. Do not underestimate the Ox. The wood Rooster is almost as deceptive as the wood Monkey if a little less violent. Opening with an earth ox means it may not be being given a free ticket.
It’s Curtains
In the stolen time between Christmas and New Year when no one knows what day it is, a lady rang. I did her feng shui two years ago. She has the beautiful voice you might expect of a specialist in speech work. Her house backs onto the North West with a little jutting-out piece to the West. West being about voice and parties and the North West about experience, respect and authority, this is not a bad configuration for her. Both North West and West are of course of the metal element which call, I told her, for white and metallic colours as well as round shapes. As the metal was strong, greens would work too.
However, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, she had meanwhile hung a huge red curtain the full width of the back wall. Red is of the element fire which you will recall, melts metal. It was apparently velvet, a thick burgundy red; probably very beautiful but totally wrong. So now she was complaining of a quiet time as well as rising damp. Equally, North West being about the mature man, the relationship she was desperate to attract had still not materialised.
Obviously I told her once more to take the curtain down.
Then we discussed her daughter whose life is not rushing ahead and whose room is cream where I expressly prescribed white.
“White is close to cream. What about peach?”
These are things that can not be dealt with adequately on the phone. In the New Year I will go and sort this out. It is after all my advice she is not listening to.
Clutter.
Another client rang me this week. I had advised on her new house before she moved in.
At that time she was between relationships and fed up with episodic romances with younger men. At fifty she was still beautiful so she could attract them easily enough but what she wanted was commitment. As Chuck Spezzano says, the “c” word. Together we had together carefully located the tai chi – the dead centre of the house and I had explained that this was the focus of all the energies. Generally it is kept quiet because it is so busy. There is at this spot a sample of every type of chi present. Treat it with respect. If you put things there they should represent what you want for life: images of the relationships you aspire to, your ideal career path, the qualities that matter to you.
Now her life was stalled again. Could I help? Well of course. What had she changed about the house?
Where the tai chi was, she had filled the room with boxes six feet high. You couldn’t even get in there. Clear it out for God’s sake. Do you simply want more of what is in the boxes? Old letters? Mementoes, photographs and souvenirs, disappointments you have not let go of, hopes you should have dismissed by now?
I’ll go and see her in the New Year too. The common factor is me so I have to take her daftness as my own.
Careers have been built, so to speak, on clutter and there are a lot of misunderstandings.
Clutter is not the same as mess. Nor is a pile of stuff necessarily clutter. What is to be avoided is the trapped energy of stagnation. We buy a book meaning to read it and never do and it stays on our bookshelf representing a frustrated aspiration. This is clutter. We hang onto what a lost lover left behind hoping on some level they will return to claim it. This is clutter.
If you go into the office of a very busy lawyer you are likely to be confronted with piles of files and thick open volumes. In the office of the cleverest lawyer I know, there is virtually never any floor space. But every time you enter, the files are different, the volumes open to different pages. This is not clutter. There is no dust on the books.
As a rule of thumb: if you love it or are using it, keep it. If it’s a cd you never played or a book you never read, ask yourself honestly whether that will change. If not pass it on.
These are physical metaphors. It is what they mean that counts. Location and timing will tell us a lot about this but you know their meaning. A distinguished friend of mine is fond of quoting that “Sometimes a Mars bar is only a Mars bar.” No it isn’t. Not ever.
Tsunami
As I comment in the (attached) 2005 Predictions, the tsunami was visible in the year numbers based on the moment the year changed at dung gee, the Winter Solstice. I did not interpret the numbers this way although some of the Chinese Masters probably did. If my predictions are to be taken seriously I felt I needed to own up to this.I seem to have chosen birth into a universe with quite a lot of negative. My job is to identify and help heal this without magnifying it. There are enough Jeremiahs in the world.
The Chinese symbols used in divination are predominantly negative and a Chinese friend was explaining to me that the particular tooth-sucking give-me-money-and-I’ll-save-you-from-the-hidden-horrors-of-your-destiny approach of certain diviners was exactly why Mao banned feng shui and I Ching studies. Fear is a powerful impetus to action. Superstitious fear is among the most powerful.
I don’t ever want to make this mistake; I only want to make predictions that are useful and nourishing. I make no apology for this but I nonetheless hope you can understand it. So where I appear negative in my predictions it is because I believe it is necessary. Similarly I’m only going to look for natural disasters in the numbers if I think prediction will help.
And let us never forget that we have choice.
Next time: Something a bit lighter!
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richard features in the new series of Channel Five’s Housebusters:
Fridays 8.30pm Channel 5.