Rooster Month – September 2015

The (8^th) month of the Wood Rooster 2015.

(Sept 8^th 08:10 to Oct 9^th 00:09 inclusive)

Kuan

———-

———-

—- —-

—- —-

—- —-

—- —-

The Watchtower

Hexagram 20

The Rooster Month, Animal by Animal.

During this Wood Rooster month:

The Rat may feel overshadowed.

The Ox may feel surprisingly supported.

The Tiger may recover from defeat.

The Rabbit may want to stay home.

The Dragon may feel special.

The Snake may take several steps forward.

The Horse may rise to competition.

The Sheep may seek solitude.

The Monkey may rest.

The Rooster may seek grace.

The Dog awaits.

and

The Pig is the protector.

Berried.

Today the blackberries are leaning towards me as if they want to be picked. Two or three days a week at this time of year I pluck them fresh for our morning smoothie. This ticks several boxes: that is to say a boost of Vitamin C with all the benefits of fresh fruit which is in this case (extremely) locally grown. Which was good feng shui long before it became the stuff of discussion on Radio 4. “Eat local food, drink local Water,” Master Chan Kun Wah used to say. Yesterday I had to stretch for the berries, today they come easily to hand.

Blackberries need to be plump but not mushy and they must be caught before – God forbid – they grow those whiskers that even the finest liquidiser blade struggles to dissolve. It’s September, the pure qi of the Monkey month; there are plenty to choose from.

Although it’s a fine day, the Autumn warmth is turning to the chillier bak low, that is the time of White Dew. It’s a distinctive back-to-school, end of holiday feeling. My hibiscus is hibiscing but the sunflowers have peaked; they stand like Eddard Stark waiting to be decapitated. Despite the sun, I can feel the damp in the air.

Where to do what, when and why.

The 8 Star lands North West this month and of course the North West is favoured all year. Like the (related) symbol for infinity, 8 speaks of limitless possibility. This is where to locate to catch the breaks. Facing NW or employing a North Western door will tend to have the same sort of effect this month also.

Women on the verge.

I’ve been working a great deal with women in the midst of divorce recently. “How did I misunderstand him so badly?” one asks me. “He seemed such a nice guy.” I offer something gnomic like “Most men can leave a lover but few can leave their Mum.” Which is true. But mostly I listen and compensate for neglected South West areas and ferocious North West ones. One house features a single external wall which pushes into the building between North and North West like a siege engine, effectively making land over to the neighbours. There are few more intrusive feng shui flaws than this. The aggressive North West is the realm of the Father, the North represents the Mother being squeezed out. Pick the bones out of that. Within this house we place protective Water with great precision on the 3^rd September, the best day for some time for such a cure and we start to choose strategies. I have to be careful not to exceed my brief; I’m a feng shui man not a lawyer. So I prescribe Chapter One of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”. He’s the guvnor on winning.

The Rooster Month in the Sheep Year.

The Rooster may not have had a great shake of it this year. Or at least that may be the way she tells it. But often the Rooster simply hasn’t looked up from their self-punishment long enough to notice that they’re doing okay. How many openings did you miss or fail to acknowledge?

So in your own month you’d expect a boost wouldn’t you? Well the Rooster suffers from the so-called “self-clash” which means this month is an even bigger challenge. It will tend to empower Oxen and Snakes and Dragons but some Roosters may be too busy bemoaning their luck to appreciate good fortune. Your own month demands you step up. If you do, you may experience September as a peak. One proviso: every gain at the expense of another leaves you in debt. Generosity this month pays big dividends.

As for everyone else; the Rooster can inhibit the Rabbit. So Rabbits – like Hungarian demagogue Viktor Orban – ought perhaps to lower their sights this month. There is no fence high enough to solve the refugee problem, Viktor. Forget it.

This is a month of attention-seeking behavior which may be most visible in the Horses such as David Cameron and Angela Merkel. The need for approval of course is a function of insecurity. Which means those most uncertain breeds, politicians and celebrities will be especially intrusive. And the Dog can get very impatient around about now. You want to get on with it while everyone else appears to be painting their nails. Take Fire Dog Donald Trump for instance, safe in the certainty that even Americans are not daft enough to elect him, continuing to let his mouth write cheques no administration could ever cash. Pigs may be more modest but nothing can keep the limelight off Earth Pig Caitlyn (nee Bruce) Jenner.

That’s September, step up or be generous or both.

A very Chinese puzzle.

The traditional Chinese finger puzzle tightens over the hand with every struggle. China has been in the grip of the benign puzzle of Confucian thinking since the fourth century BCE. This means that family and a stable society have been the priorities all that time. These are sound values of course but they come with an assumption which is this: Daddy knows best. Whether he is the ruthless Ming usurper Yongle whose victims included most of the males of his family or Qin Shi Huang Di a huge chunk of whose retinue, horses, stewards, servants and wives were buried alive with him, Mao Tse Tung or Deng Xiao Ping, Daddy’s decisions are final and infallible. And down twenty-odd centuries, a dozen dynasties, countless tyrants, even more countless massacres and no discussion, these values have persisted. And now right on time, just as Sheep turns to Monkey, China has its very own financial crisis; a very Confucian one. The powers-that-be imprison a few journalists for expressing an opinion and legislate against the trickery that makes up a market place: insider trading, short selling and the dead hand of stop-loss algorithms, these things have been the life blood of the Hang Seng for decades.

But you can’t run over a stock market with tanks any more than you can a blackberry. Nor is it practical to line either market or fresh fruit up against a wall and shoot them. Stock markets are free expression personified. No legislation in China will stay the hand of some pleonetic trader on Wall Street or the City of London any more that it will change the fact that no company loses 8% of its value over night. It’s all about confidence, a manic depressive pattern if you like; depression followed by over-confidence, Water followed by Fire. For these and other reasons many of us long since read June 2014 as the peak of all markets, the apogee of capitalism perhaps and we seem to have been right. And Xi Jinping* may, for better or for worse be a very different man from Deng but what’s for sure is that however many times the PRC responds to opposition with violence whether it be Tibet, Google, FaceBook, the Umbrella Revolution or that kid with the shopping bag crossing Tiananmen Square, dissidence will rise again. You cannot imprison the human mind. And as long as free expression, of which a stock market crash is the essence, is suppressed, as long as Ai Wei Wei can’t get proper travel documents, China may continue to manufacture the world’s trainers but she won’t design them and stock markets will remain volatile however much Daddy might wish it different.

*Which is not to contrast him with our own largely spine- and compassion-free representatives btw. Nor for the avoidance of doubt, that markets should be unregulated. George Soros is the guvnor on this. Read his “Open Society” perhaps.

Rooster Pillars; know your Rooster rating.

Birth in the Rooster hour (17:00pm-19:00pm): beautiful children.

Birth in the Rooster month (September*): accountancy may suit you.

Birth on the Rooster day#: marriage may not be for you.

Birth in the Rooster year: particularly sociable parents.

* Caution, the Chinese month generally starts and finishes a few days after ours.

# Just ask.

Richard Ashworth©, on the last day of the Monkey, 2015.