Off to see the Wizard.
Off to see the Wizard.
“Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly”. Arlen and Harburg, “Over the Rainbow.”
Another chapter from my forthcoming book Love Made Visible which like The Feng Shui Diaries, is pretty much an account of what it was to be a working feng shui practitioner and ultimately Master from the year 2000 to date. In this chapter I first come across Merlin Woolcott, the Rasputin of Ripley, a man of charm, good intentions, genuine power and terrible taste in music. now read on….
The story is told of the Abbot who assembled his students one morning to witness that overnight had been placed across the monastery courtyard a line of stones in sequence: eight white, one black, then again eight white and one black, all the way to the monastery gate and beyond into the valley. As the dawn light spread it became clear that the sequence might indeed stretch to the valley wall.
Cue hubbub and discussion. The smarter students would have suspected that this was something to do with the properties of these numbers: nine is generally considered a Fire number, eight Earth and one Water. Was there a special sequence here? What was the significance of the colours?
Among the novices was one who had been studying long and hard and was tired of enigma. He had become restless and ambitious. It was probably time he moved on. As the saying goes, when we meet the Buddha on the road we must kill him; when we surpass our sifu we become the sifu. Knowing this, the Abbot was looking straight at him as he asked the group a question:
“Suppose this line continued for ever, eight white and one black, eight white and one black? Suppose the stones were all piled into two heaps: the black stones into one and the white ones into another. Which would be higher?”
“That’s obvious,” said the student before anyone else could speak. “However long the line continued, the white pile would be eight times higher than the black.”
“No,” said the Abbot, “If the line went on forever, the piles would be exactly equal.”
This story may clarify the ideas of yin and yang. But it may just baffle. Like so many Chinese notions, these ideas are acorns that contain forests of oaks. Yin is the feminine principle – darker, slower, smaller, more empowering than acting, more subtle, more elusive; yang is lighter, more rapid, larger, more outgoing, more egotistical, more obvious. Since everything is more yin than something else and indeed more yang; everything is bigger than something else and more yin and so on, these concepts hint at relativity and infinity and so much more.
The tao that can be named, Lao Tze wrote, is not the tao. The Tao is present and not present. It is what perhaps tells the blackbird’s egg to become a blackbird, it is something like the purpose of the universe and it will not be second-guessed. Except when it will. Something appears to precede life and something to follow it and much of what is defies explanation. The Tao may represent a kind of shorthand for the inevitability of incomprehension. And yin and yang are kind of shorthand for the separation and contrast that make up the physical. Perhaps the Zhou diviners from whose tradition so much of this derives, were onto something.
As a general rule these are not concepts readily put to bed over a pint of IPA but of all people, Merlin Woolcott was the most game to attempt it.
There was a time in the 1990’s when anybody who’d had a free weekend was qualified as a Reiki Master. Merlin Woolcott described himself as just that but also as a shaman. Although I didn’t take that claim seriously at first, what he was for sure was a healer, a light worker, a man who could not encounter upset and leave it be. A tall broad man with a goonish smile, wherever he went he spread light.
No one had taught Merlin healing. It was who he was. This probably sounds hopelessly new age but Merlin always left smiles behind him. He was without boundaries. If I was out with him walking the streets of Camborne or Bodmin, however briefly, I could expect him to be stopped several times and after a brief chat, touch someone gently.
“What’s the problem?” he might ask and then apply a little pressure to a shoulder or a wrist. Sometimes not that gently actually, he was a powerful man.
Until he was forty Merlin ran the stores department of an electronics company in Surrey. As a manager he was probably pretty haphazard, as a human being he certainly was. But the thing about his department was that his staff never got ill. One time he was asked by the CEO to explain how it was that he suffered literally zero absenteeism.
“I just love them,” he said.
Merlin was not formally educated and it would have been easy to write him off as an idiot hippy. Which I almost did until he had beaten me several times at chess and I’d listened to him conduct a conference call simultaneously in English, French and Portuguese. He had terrible taste in music – Hawkwind and God forbid, the Pink Fairies – knew no history and little current affairs and he didn’t read at all. He claimed he could “know” a book without reading it. And by the time I had been working with him a while I almost believed him. But he was a very simple individual with no long words or complex ideas. Merlin did however have strong views about money. He hated it and the wickedness it drew out of people.
“Those banks,” he’d say. And over time that view spread to all forms of business. Money was the enemy. Not essentially that I disagreed with him.
I first met him at a new age gathering in a large garden outside Guildford. My wife Sheila and I were making our way across to the Quorn burgers when we spotted a tall broad man in a canvas smock rolling a cigarette next to a picnic table with several empty folding chairs. It appeared that the vibration had knocked his craft beer all over the place.
“Organic,” he said without looking up. A swamp was building up around the cigarette.
“Want one?”
We pulled up a couple of chairs.
“A beer?”
“A rollie.”
“No thanks. I don’t.”
“Organic,” he repeated, “Can’t hurt you. Why would any plant want to?”
“A question I’ve not often been asked.”
He told me he was a healer. I told him I was a feng shui man. His face wrinkled.
“What’s that?”
“Chinese mumbo-jumbo,” I said. “I move energies.”
“Hmm. Me too. People hurt. They don’t have to.”
“I know,” I said.
“Feng shui?” He pronounced it feng shuway as most Europeans do. “How do you say it?”
“That’ll do.”
“All about buildings?”
“Kind of. Feng shui” – I pronounced it the Cantonese way fung shoi – “is about people. In buildings. But I’m probably best known for ba zi.”
“Ba…zi?” he stumbled over the alien words.
“The Four Pillars of Destiny, personal feng shui based on date of birth, sometimes misleadingly called a Chinese horoscope.”
“Why’s that misleading?”
“Because “horoscope” implies tall dark strangers and ba zi is a healing tool.”
“Hmm. So you’re well known? Celebrities, business that kind of thing?”
“Up to a point.”
“I bet you charge loads of money.”
“I have mouths to feed.”
He told me he had his eyes on a derelict barn in Cornwall that had called out to him as he drove past it. He would love he said, to turn it into a retreat but he had no money. Which led to a brief rant about the evils of wealth, privatised rail, Richard Branson and the price of vinyl, while over to one side of the garden a representative of UKIP was loudly explaining that Brexit was the only way to save herbal remedies. Early days, this was 2005.
The property was on the edge of a cliff near Poldhu, Merlin explained. I had actually been brought up not far away.
“I say “brought up”; I was climbing cliffs before I was old enough to go to school.”
“This feng shui, how does it work?” Merlin asked.
“You’ve heard of the Chinese Five Elements?”
“I think so.”
“Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal. Different qualities, tastes, feels, something like that. They belong in particular places and particular times.”
“And if they’re in the wrong place, you move them?”
“Basically.”
“Hmm. That’s a good idea.”
“Thank you.”
“I can see how you could ask lot of money for that.”
“You too, I expect.”
“I don’t charge,” he said and looking at me quizzically, took a deep drag of his rollie and sniffed the air. “Fair play,” he added and clapped me hard on the back. I gasped; when Merlin clapped a back, it stayed clapped.
“People are in pain,” he repeated. “They don’t have to be.”
We discussed family. He had two twenty-ish sons. Our teenage daughters Jess and Hen and our son Joey, then ten or so had joined us by now. The kids were amused. There was something very sweet and naïve about this man. A Master, as they say is respected by wise men and loved by children. If you will seek a Master, follow the laughter.
Merlin’s wife had recently told him that they wouldn’t be together much longer. Which had simply puzzled him. Then he told me that one of his sons had been suffering psychotic episodes, both confidences I didn’t expect.
“Nothing harder than watching our children suffer,” I said. My oldest son Jaime had a heart operation when he was fifteen, I told him. It only took about two hours but they were the longest two hours of my life.
Merlin nodded. “Stephen doesn’t hurt anyone. Only himself. But he’s strong as a wild bull when he goes. Like the Incredible Hulk. Last time it took two big policemen to hold him down.”
I winced.
There was a pause. Perhaps he’d told me more than he’d meant to. After all we’d only just met. Perhaps it was the Hogs Back Ale talking.
“Wood,” I said.
“What?”
“That kind of upset is often about an excess of Wood.”
I went on to explain a little Chinese Elemental Theory. Because of its configuration a house can have too much Fire or too much Water for instance, which can make for things happening too rapidly or not at all. The same thing can be true of a person. This is the sort of thing a ba zi (that is Chinese Horoscope) can indicate. I gave him a rapid history of Chinese metaphysics.
Wood among other things stands for tsun the Wind. Too little and nothing happens, too much and there is the shock of the tai feng or Great Wind. “The qi comes down from the Mountain on the Wind and is held at the Water,” is how the Book of Odes puts it. “Therefore preserve the Water and protect against the Wind.”
I was imagining a building on a Cornish cliff where the trees grow up bent double.
“And there’s always choice,” I concluded.
“Mine or Stephen’s?”
“Yours since I’m talking with you.”
“I like that. So I can choose for him to be better?”
“It may take some jumping through hoops. But yes.”
“That’s a great idea,” he said and clapped me on the back again.
He asked for my number, had one last rant about the evils of money, we mingled and the last I saw he was striding off towards an ancient four-by-four covered in decals and transfers, running a gauntlet of hugs as person after person he passed pulled him to them.
When I next heard from Merlin, maybe a year later, he suddenly he had some money himself. Quite a lot actually. His grandfather had died leaving him more than he’d ever handled in his life. He had bought the place in Cornwall; on a sharp bend just back from the cliff. His mission, he said, was to make it holy.
Who you gonna call?
Richard Ashworth 2025