Friday April 20th 2008 01.39
Sheep Low
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Friday April 20th2008 01.39
Hour Day Month Year
fire metal fire earth
ding geng bing wu
chou yan zhen tze
ox tiger dragon rat
Month: bing zhen the fire Dragon
Solar Fortnight: kuk yu Grain Rains
Sheep Low
Grain Rains. In the meadow at the bottom of the garden, the sheep low – if indeed lowing is what sheep do. From this distance it sounds like the preliminary buzz of my Blackberry picking up an email. The day is warm and dry with the promise of rain in the air. The plants like the water fountains, need so much water at this time when the seeds are flying and everything that grows is shooting up.
Bing zhen, the fire dragon, a time when things happen rapidly.
For some, the word miracle means a thing that will never occur. Don’t hold your breath waiting. For others a miracle is an unusual event but not one to be discounted altogether. Some people call for big miracles, some for small. The Course in Miracles* says that Miracles are natural. When they do not occur, something has gone wrong.
You don’t generally invoke the world of woo-woo for the commonplace but you might call the feng shui man in. And there are times when the feng shui involved in attempting to deliver can be very complex. It can involve ancient and precise formula and tip-of-a-pin timing. Getting Gina to ignore her daughter’s untidy room and love her own mother was not among them. We might call this a small miracle.
* Arkana 1-85063-016-X in case you thought I’d made it up. This is a wonderful and important book by the way.
Small Miracles
If you remember, back in February, 10-year old Pandora’s bedroom was in the throes of a year-long impression of the morning after a rock festival. Not that there’s anything wrong with rock festivals, it’s just that we don’t generally want them in a three-bed in Eastbourne in February.
The problem with Pandora’s bedroom, you may recall, was not a problem with Pandora’s bedroom. What I mean by this apparent nonsense is that when we look at things through the prism of the tao, everything is its opposite. Just as empty bottles make the most noise and arctic explorers are afraid of commitment, so a daughter problem is not a daughter problem. It is probably a mother problem and vice-versa.
You may remember I suggested Gina disappear the mini-WOMAD by going within and letting her mother off the hook. There had been tension between them for decades and Gina’s children knew all about it. They had learned what mothers were like. This is the tao.
As it happens this was not the first time I had seen exactly this pattern. In 2006 I visited another client Sue, whose new home had a disused toilet outdoors in the South West. Actually Sue had been my first full paying client several years earlier when I first came out to the world as a feng shui man. Her first husband who I had known well, had died suddenly and young a year earlier and she had been left with three small children and a lot of plans that were never going to happen.
Her new husband appeared on the scene shortly after we painted her cold bedroom bordello red and in 2006 she found a new home to share with him.
Had I simply defined the South West of this new home as the place of relationship (which is always tempting) the metaphor would have been clear: relationship down toilet. We could have cleared the area with crystals and concentration, calculated the flying stars and taken it from there: wind chimes maybe, a carefully placed water feature, instructions as to whether to sleep or play here or neither. This is what feng shui men are expected to do.
But it didn’t feel right. As it happens, in classical feng shui, the South West is the home of kun the Mother whose number is two and who does presumably know a thing or two about relationship.
I asked her about her own mother. The response was rapid and acid but what was actually upsetting her, it turned out, concerned neither man-woman relationship nor her mother but her daughters.
One daughter had walked out – toss, pout, slam – at Christmas and not returned and the other, aged 15, had announced that she was having sex with her boyfriend – in the house – and her parents could like it or lump it. These were the problems presented so graphically by the broken toilet in the South West which many (though none of them feng shui masters) would call the relationship area.
Sue’s daughter problem was a mother problem.
“We all have reservations about our parents,” I told her, “And all our children have reservations about us.”
I have six children and I realise we don’t get dummies to practise on by the way.
“I know,” Sue said with a sigh that meant she knew I was right, hated the fact and was gracious enough not to hate me for it.
To her eternal credit, she made the changes I advised and spent long quiet time taking responsibility for her dispute with her own mother. The word for this of course is forgiveness which does not mean being magnanimous about another’s poor behaviour but getting that no crime was committed and that our prints are in any case all over the crime scene. We get exactly the parents (and children) that suit us and bitterness is such a waste of time. Another word for what Sue did was simply to love her mother.
So I was sort of ready for Gina in February.
I told her to ignore the room, you may recall and also to forgive her mother. To her credit she was as ready to humour me as Sue was.
And it appears to have worked, as she can tell you in her own words. Below I reproduce in full her email:
“I told(Pandora) I had a new cleaner starting soon, but she wouldn’t be going into her room, that if the floor and surfaces were clear the cleaner could hoover etc. She got upset and said, why couldn’t she tidy up? I explained that that had happened several times before and the room ended up the same quite soon. If she was paying out of her money, sure, the cleaner could do a few hours. ‘Oh I can’t afford to pay and that’s not fair!’ I told her that if she wanted it tidy, that was up to her, it was her room, I’m not telling her she has to do it. Been there, tried that and it hadn’t worked.
She then tried to bargain with me and came up with a proposition, that I give her £2 if it was cleared tonight. I paused and thought to myself, that is a very cheap deal knowing Pandora, not as greedy as I would of expected. I said, OK then, if you do it tonight, if it’s not done today the deals off. OK she said and merrily trotted off.
I ignored her for ages, and didn’t investigate. She appeared and said,’if I dont finish it tonight can I get £1.50 if it’s done by Monday?’ (she was off to her Dad’s all weekend) or £1 if it’s Tues.? OK, I nonchalantly replied.
Well, I was eventually invited in, and by ‘normal’ standards it was pretty rough , but blow me, all the clothes had disappeared, just an unpleasant tideline washing up murkily in the corners. I even peeped under the bed and she proudly told me they weren’t there. ‘Where ARE they’ I asked in astonishment, and she swiftly opened a couple of drawers. She even agreed to hoover up the thick sediment so it didn’t spread round the house, and lifted the hoover upstairs without a moan or asking me to help.
She came down for her £2 and said now I couldn’t go on about her room (I hadn’t for a while anyway) and that felt good. She asked if she could go to Primark after school to spend the money and meet up with me.
We did, and she was in a lovely mood, not getting in a tizz, carefully spending some amassed pocket money on various clothes.
I realise that the 2 quid was about her having a token win and last say and establishing the power balance in her mind, knowing that she wasn’t ripping me off but that she could feel she was controlling the situation. She knew that I knew.”
Bigger Miracles
On the other side of the world these gentle grain rains are reflected by floods and ructions. In China tens of thousands have died in the wake of a spiteful earthquake that has plucked children from their parents. This in a nation where one child per family is law. The bereaved with their puzzled faces want just one thing: their children back. Miracles are natural. When they do not occur, something has gone wrong.
And in Burma, bullied for a generation by generals who make Saddam Hussein look like a moderate, a cyclone has killed an obscene 50,000 plus. In the week following the cyclone, while farmers in the Irrawaddy Basin were systematically denied aid as a form of low-budget ethnic cleansing, the planned government referendum went ahead gaining a ludicrous 92% approval. Miracles are natural. When they do not occur, something has gone wrong.
On the tv I saw a Chinese woman pointing out a government building intact next to a crumpled schoolhouse. Built by the lowest bidder and the most prolific giver of bribes. Miracles are natural. When they do not occur, something has gone wrong.
Perhaps in time good will come of this. Perhaps a Chinese administration frustrated by the refusal of world opinion to see its point, will withdraw support from Burma. Perhaps the corruption endemic in local administration in China will be corrected.
These changes would be big miracles indeed.
Some people want small miracles, some want bigger and who am I to say which is which?
Richard Ashworth © 2008
Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.
My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is atwww.imperialfengshui.info and 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)
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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