Wednesday December 7th 2008 02.10

Hope and Keep the Change

Solar fortnight beginning:

Wednesday December 7^th 2008 02.10

It’s been quite a year, this Rat year: a new US President, banks dropping like leaves, companies changing hands for a couple of quid, Tottenham Hotspur scoring goals. And 2008 saw the end of some great love affairs: Guy and Madge, Morinho and Chelsea, Bush and Rumsfeld, the Spice Girls. This was never the time for the big bands to reform; notice that Take That chose the previous year for their better received renaissance. In 2009 this chaos settles somewhat.

It may not be obvious that I’m saying the same thing but those of you living in those South facing houses that were so difficult this year will find life a great deal easier too. One of these, my friend Laura who shares a surname with a celebrated Italian actress of the 1950’s, contacts me by email while I’m on the bus. When I’m back, she wants me to revamp her feng shui in line with the year. My cures appear to have lightened her burden. I’m glad and I look forward to it. A South-facing house could mean fame, fortune and promotion in 2009. As usual come January, I’m going to be a busy boy.

I’m heading for KL for a meeting with Lillian Too who has singlehandedly rescued the Singapore Conference. We have business to discuss and she has invited me out to her house to talk. She has also included me in a family celebration that happens to be taking place while I’m here. I am humbled. This woman has sold a million books and built a whole business empire out of feng shui. I’m very interested to see how she manages the feng shui of her own home. Her impossibly thorough assistant Connie has booked my hotel and arranged transport.

The Conference numbers were clearly up on last year with many of the additional attendees there principally to see Ms Lillian. There were however still too many shapeless panel discussions. There have been some important highlights: I learned a great deal from Master Tan Khoon Yong’s account of the feng shui of the new Singapore Casino. It’s backing onto water and facing height which is about as difficult as feng shui gets but Master Tan who looks like nothing so much as an Aztec statue as he declaims, is a genius. If anyone can make it work I imagine it’s him.

Raymond Lo’s account of the financial tsunami also was beyond masterful. Early next year however I promise myself, I will get back to Hong Kong where reside the anonymous nonagenarian grandmasters to whom all of these defer.

As the cleared jungle flashes past I look in my Chinese Calendar to draft the date pillars you can see at the top of this page. I am told that the Malaysian jungle is logged out. I pause to feel sad. Malysian hardwood has joined the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger. It’s so easy to take a superior Western position on this, something for which my public-school education has equipped me uniquely well. In Europe we’ve had fridges and cars and pollution a long time but it’s all relatively novel here. The first man to build a dry stone wall was a vandal (or possibly a Visigoth). Loris fly by with the emblems of a hundred manufacturers, this place may be logged out but it is full of enterprise. Who knows the shape progress may take?

I have abused my Chinese Calendar for so long with the packing and folding of constant use that its loosely-bound pages are spilling out and it is held it together with a rubber band. I open it at the beginning of December 2008: the earth Ox is already peeking through to check how the land lies. Notice it in the hour pillar on the left above. There is a taste here of things to come. The character for the yin earth stem that qualifies the Ox all year, making it yin earth twice over, is pronounced ji in Mandarin.Like the Ox it implies fertility and growth issues. We can expect at least the first half of 2009 to be more stable and for fertility, growth and relationship to be hot topics.

Love always is a hot topic of course. As the Beatles insisted, it is all you need and it does of course make the world go round. This is doubly emphasised in 2009.

I’m listening to Mamma Mia on my i-pod. I could watch that movie on a loop. Does this mean I’m what my son Joey would call sad? One thing it does mean is that I find nothing as reassuring as emotional music. John Stewart’s Wild Horse Road follows. This song about the American spirit from a contender for the greatest songwriter of the 20^th century (You’ll know Daydream Believer which he wrote for the Monkees) summarises how everything might still turn out right. Obama has employed Hillary and a climate-change specialist.

“Shoot all the wild horses and how will we ride?” the grizzled old redneck sings.

I wonder if Obama knows this tune?

As it happens, on February 14^th I am hosting in London, a day on Feng Shui for Romance. If you are up for spicing up your love life, contact the very lovely, very dynamic Gilli. (gd@lumina.co.uk) More next month but for now I can tell you I’ll be looking at the ba zi (or personal feng shui) of each attendee to see exactly how the spice may be enticed. I’ll also be suggesting a series of feng shui tricks.

Here’s one:

1. Ascertain the facing direction of your home (or office if that’s where you want this to happen. Whatever blows your hair back).
2. Then work out what type of chi that entails. There’s a table at the foot of this diary entry that lays it out.
3. From the table, ascertain the Plum Flower (or Toe Fat) location
4. Place four bright flowers in water at the Toe Fat spot. Keep fresh, replace when necessary.

Gilli wants to call the day Toe Fat. I’m not sure about the image but what do I know?

My friend Russ who has finally found a possible soul mate emails to let me know that the soul mate doesn’t appear to be shaping up. She can’t she tells him, juggle her job and her children with a new love. Russ takes this as a rejection.

“Rejection? Maybe,” I tell him. “It could be girl talk for “Are you serious?”

The South rises again.

The land gets dustier.

As we drive North through Malaysia, I wonder just how safe we are. It’s all motorway but seated next to the affable Indian driver is a thickset Malay I would not argue with. As we cross the causeway that separates Singapore from Malaysia he glares at the Straits of Malacca as if he has a personal grievance with them. In his rear-view mirror, the driver examines the pretty girls to my right, like coach drivers the world over. This could be the M4. North-South a tricky axis to travel in 2008 of course.

In 2009 there is recovery. The Year Breaker, Three Calamities and 5 Yellow all of which crowded the South in 2009, are distributed more democratically. This is good news. We need to be wary of the North, North East and East this year but there is no such thing as a no-go area. My usual map which follows in January will make this clearer.

I arrive in Kuala Lumpur, a busy city thick with dust and cars. I am abandoned by the coach in a city lay by which is momentarily terrifying. A young Indian approaches.

“You want a taxi?”

I didn’t think I did but I rapidly assess the various implications of my three pieces of luggage, the strange busy city and the search for public transport. The map says there is a metro system but the view along the road for half-a-mile in either direction offers no hint of where. The young Indian’s dented Proton looks suddenly very attractive. I am confused by the exchange of currency from Sterling to Singapore dollars to Malaysian ringgits but I can see pretty rapidly that he is charging me half the cash I have on me. Not that that amounts to an extortionate fare.

At this point my friend Vicky calls:

“Are you in KL yet?”

“Uh yes.”

Vicky is Lithuanian. She is a graduate of Lillian Too’s training, an expert on symbolic or placement feng shui and the London franchisee of the World of Feng Shui chain of stores. She is in KL and knows her way around. She is also a veteran of national service in the Russian military. I’m not sure which of these assets takes precedence at this point.

She explains that her hotel is just yards from mine.

“Head for Mid-Valley. It’s not far.”

Indeed it isn’t and it’s a cosy Four Star job where they tolerate my English. Every nation but Britain teems with linguists.

Settled, I visit Borders. They have my book The Feng Shui Diaries in stock and for twenty minutes I feel eminent. The Too family event I have been invited to is the first full moon of Lillian’s second grandson. I need a gift: I buy him a book of poetry selected by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President. As it happens Jennifer, the little boy’s gorgeous Cambridge-educated mother, has just included a profile of Ms K in Feng Shui World, the world’s biggest selling feng shui magazine. This reminds me that I have for a number of reasons tipped Caroline, a fire Rooster of 1957 to be America’s first woman president. 2016, I think. Comprehended in this forecast is the fact that as it further happens I once knew Caroline just a little. When she was a fine arts undergraduate at Goldsmiths and I was studying Philosophy at London University, I worked part time in a record shop in Victoria and she used to visit, browse and sometimes buy. It was a small one-man shop. She was a pretty and affable girl. We talked at some length perhaps three times. She bought a Melanie album, I think. That and the fact that she was a sweet girl with a nice sense of humour is all that I know outside of her ba zi but it’s enough. You’d think this was a self-aggrandising lie except that I have a thousand of these stories. It’s amazing what happens when you follow your nose and stay conscious. As well as the verse I buy Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink again, having noticed Lillian quoting it in Singapore, pay cash and leave.

Baroque Oilburner

2008 favoured the South East and the financial meltdown may have tipped the pivot of the world so that its economic centre now lies on the Pacific rim. From 2009 watch India and China buy up the world. And Malaysia of course. Unlike the British they still make things.

I was reminded in Singapore of an insight of (now Grand) Master Raymond Lo’s. It was this: very often when a ba zi’s day stem – the character of the precise day of birth that defines the person – is yin earth, they are gay or bisexual. As it happens I had made a similar discovery myself because having been taught in Cantonese, I generally pronounce this character not ji but gay. There are no rules allowing this. It is pure divination and we do it at our own risk. I shall however be teaching just such approaches in my ba zi course this year.

So gender issues, civil partnerships, gay and other rights will tend to occupy the media in 2009. Toujours la change…..

At the celebration itself, I sit with Vicky who informs me that in Lithuanian there is no word for cheers. It seems they don’t want to hold up the drinking with niceties. We sit next to a Buddhist monk and a Nepalese carpenter. I met them earlier chez Lillian, constructing a mammoth prayer wheel. She invited me to touch the fine gold-embroidered cloth and seek blessing. I know enough never to refuse a blessing.

The Monk is Tibetan but has never been to Tibet.

“I have a Nepalese passport,” he says cheerfully.

We discuss the opportunities for Tibet offered by the recent Beijing Olympics.

“The Dalai Lama seeks autonomy. For others this does not go far enough. The groups could not agree. The opportunity was wasted.”

“And you?” I ask him.

“It all works out,” he says. His voice and his eyes are equally cheerful.

His friend the carpenter has brought his family to Malaysia. For a moment I misunderstand him to be saying that his children have been left behind but they are here in KL although he still thinks of Nepal as home. He smiles so warmly as he talks about his children that I miss my own though I left them only a couple of days ago and will see them again this week.

The smiling monk tells me that he remains a Tibetan. He is a little younger than me so he must have been a hereditary émigré these forty-odd years. There is something heartbreaking about his good humour.

I point out to him that when the Chinese organised professional demonstrations against France for their solidarity with Tibet, they had done their home work. What actually took place was a picketing of the Beijing branch of Carrefour proclaiming independence for Corsica. Why Corsica? The answer is this: Corsica became French in 1764, just five years before Napoleon’s birth. Had Bonaparte been conceived just a tad earlier he would have been born Genoese. And just thirteen years earlier, it was in 1751 that the Chinese Qianlong Emperor installed the 7^th Dalai Lama under Chinese protection (from the Nepalese, since you asked). This is their little joke: if one why not the other? This is how Chinese diplomacy is conducted. I look at the monk. I can feel that I have pained him. English clod. There is no sign. He is unfailingly cheerful which just makes it worse.

Jennifer mingles and recommends I read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Vicky puts a good deal of wine away. Me too. We stop at the 8^th floor bar in my hotel where the waiters all know her.

“Sto lat,” I say. This is Polish and the nearest I’m going to get to a Lithuanian blessing. She returns to her hotel and I to mine. I know she can drink more than I can.

Do or Dichotomy

And on my return as if he knew what 2009 promises, over from Dublin flies Brendan. He is 36, gay and lonely. He is a personable, presentable guy with plenty to say for himself. What can be going on?

He has already been putting into place the “activations” prescribed in November and December for my retainer clients and his life is moving. These activations are principally to boost business but yang energy is yang energy. In the fullness I need to survey his home but the next step in bringing Brendan’s life on piste is finding out how he got here.

He is not a bad-looking bloke but he is not presented to his best advantage. His clothes hide him and about ? of a stone distorts his otherwise chiselled face. He looks a bit like Jeremy Northam actually.

We are working from his ba zi. It shows that his Big Fate – the moment that a child arrives, if you like – commenced in 1976, his 5^th year. At this time it appears he recognised his sexuality and instantly suppressed it.

In talking with him I get an image of young brown legs in shorts. There is frisson in this. I can feel what he feels. Don’t ask me how; it just happens. His body appears to have responded to these limbs in an unambiguous physical manner. This is innocent of course but he wouldn’t be the first person whose sexual preferences led to awkwardness.

“How gay are you?” I ask. “On a scale of one to ten.”

“Eight or nine, I guess. Is there such a thing as a ten?”

“I don’t think so. Everyone is a non-smoker in between cigarettes.”

It has been so hard for him; first of all being gay in a traditional Catholic family and then trying to keep his secret while he pursues happiness. But he is entirely without self-pity. It is clear he means business.

We talk about the power of worry. Worry, I suggest, is what we use to concentrate on and bring about that which we claim to want to avoid. It is a tribute to the limitless power of the human mind.

“Feel what you feel and remember what you want,” I recommend. “It’s the key to the universe.”

Richard Ashworth © 2008

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

Peach Blossom Table

Facing DirectionPeach Blossom

(Place the flowers here)

Water

Monkey (SW1)

Rat(N2)Rooster (W2)

Dragon(SE1)

Fire

Tiger(NE3)

Horse(S2)Rabbit (E2)

Dog(NW1)

Wood

Pig (NW3)

Rabbit(E2)Rat (N2)

Sheep(SW1)

Metal

Snake(SE3)

Rooster(W2)Horse (S2)

Ox(NE1)

My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is atwww.imperialfengshui.infoand my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now 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

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

or indeed Tescos. Do buy it from a bookshop if you can.

Feedback is welcomed including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case. Please also let us know if you are getting too many or too few diaries or that they are appearing in Cinemascope on your screen or whatever. Thanks. R