22nd November 2004
Of pigs and roosters; They call me Mr Pig; Housebusters…
Feng Shui Diaries
Siu shuut : Slight Snow
Solar fortnight beginning
Monday Nov 22nd 2004 07.20
Hour Day Month Year
metal wood wood wood
gung yute yute gap
shun jee hoi shen
dragon snake pig monkey
Of Pigs and Roosters
Last time I claimed we had entered the month of the Rooster: for the second time this year – which the more alert among you noticed would have been a first in 5,000 years of recorded history. I am sorry. We have of course entered the month of the Pig not the Rooster. I don’t withdraw any of my comments about turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and the Rooster is indeed next year’s tai sui but it does not rule November.
That’ll teach me to cut and paste!
If you ever spot such errors or have comments to make I am always glad to receive them.
Rooster metal, Pig water; very different.
They call me Mister Pig.
Hoi, the Pig is generally reckoned to be yin water. The Hoi month arrives when there is a lot of damp about. Nothing much is growing. Things are dark. Very yin.
But there is a bright side. The Pig is domesticated, watchful and studious. In fact jia, the Chinese character for home, consists of a pig under a roof. That the Pig is scholarly derives from a play on the words zhu ti (pig’s feet) and zhu bi ti ming (top student). Since written Chinese is inherently metaphorical this connection is not to be dismissed and it is certainly true that pigs are the brightest domestic animals. I know of more than one person who turned vegetarian after the bold jailbreak of the so-called Tamworth Two – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Pig – a couple of years ago.
So this is a good time to study and plan. If your studies are demanding you might consider sitting at a window with a single trimmed conifer outside it. Such a tree, shaped like an calligrapher’s brush, is called an education tree.
Derek Walters, who is the authority on these things, always says that the Five Elements are more properly rendered Five Agents or Five Actions because their nature is to interact. Fire of itself has a certain character (hot, dry, bright) but you only start to really see that character when it interacts with another element. Water that has been in contact with the heat of fire as anyone who has made custard knows, can be a lot more use than cold. And only boiled water is 100% safe to drink.
In feng shui, specific interactions are known as combinations and the Pig is particularly rich in them. What is interesting is how readily the Pig combines to make wood with the Sheep and the Rabbit. Suddenly the water is absorbed. Communication becomes action: irrigation turns to growth. Planning becomes reality.
Watch out for the Rabbit and Sheep days when this change happens; usually early in the morning or mid-afternoon. The 2nd of December is a good example.
These formal combinations are sometimes characterised in books as an explanation of which year animals get on with which. In practice a feng shui master would not actually tend to define anybody by their year animal which is a very off-the-peg thing. Calling someone a Pig because it is the branch of their year of birth is a bit like saying Virgos tidy other people’s furniture or Americans don’t understand cricket. True but not quite the whole story.
Housebusters
People have been very complimentary about the programme last week. If you didn’t see it, it featured a couple who felt unable to settle in their Winchmore Hill home. Myself, Michele Knight, the psychic and Jane Alexander were invited to suggest reasons and remedies. Michele suggested on the doorstep before entering, that someone here was having weird dreams which was absolutely correct and Jane remarked on the extraordinary lack of clutter.
You get very little time to prepare for these programmes so most of my analysis came straight from my boots. And was evidently pretty accurate. So accurate that the couple – who I still haven’t met, by the way – were visibly shaken in the van where they were watching on closed-circuit tv.
My analysis is drawn from compass locations, environment and architectural features as well as calculations of the ba chop, yuen hom and other formulae. I did also have dates of birth. So I was able to draft ba zis and it is extraordinary how character can be construed from them. But how it is possible to know about children they had not told the producers about is harder to explain and I don’t think I’m going to try.
On the other hand it’s actually not that unusual and there are far better feng shui technicians than myself but diagnosis is usually followed by an opportunity to heal. This couple clearly had not signed up for something so insistent. And they did not choose me to help them. It’s a funny thing: (some) people will queue round the block to have their power taken away but run a mile when you offer it back to them.
This week’s programme is more straightforward and features me getting invited to do pretty much doing what I do everyday. That is solve the problems. My friend Tina whose husband we had concluded when I surveyed her house was, symbolically at least, in the bike shed, rang. He’s still in there.
Otherwise, as they say on the Fast Show, this week I are mostly been placing water features.
Next time: some predictions for 2005.
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richard features features in the new series of Channel Five’s Housebusters:
Fridays 8.30pm Channel 5.