Saturday February 18th 2006 21.28
Yu Soi: Rain Water
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Yu Soi: Rain Water
Solar fortnight beginning:
Saturday February 18th 2006 21.28
Hour Day Month Year
water water metal fire
quai quai geng bing
hai yuw yin xu
pig rooster tiger dog
Month: geng yin, the Metal Tiger.
Solar Fortnight: Yu Soi, Rain Water
Hesther’s House.
Hesther’s house faces slightly West of South. The front window was blocked with plants. Had she been a librarian, blocking it might have made sense. But Hesther is a dancer. Closing out the brightness of the sun and by extension curiosity, experimentation and recognition was clearly not appropriate. This woman’s career entails limelight..
“I can’t stand people looking, “ she said and as if to make her point, a neighbour ambled by, inches from the pane. I noted exactly what she had said. People say what they mean. Often this is more than they think they mean.
So: a dancer who did not like people looking. There was more to it of course.
It is a platitude that a woman has a deep relationship with her father. This is in my experience, pretty much always true. Hesther’s died last year. He was a complex man and not entirely without fault. She has been in mourning ever since. Little had been happening in her career and she remained uncommitted to her longtime boyfriend. Takes two to tango of course.*
Right away we pulled the plants right back out of the window. This in a relatively small flat, left several feet of emptiness. As Lao Tse says, “Solidity is an advantage but it is emptiness that makes a vessel useful,” and it is my observation that people with an expectation of abundance like unfilled space. You can generally spot the budding millionaire by the space they allow themselves to move within: lots of space equals loadsamoney. Feng shui after all is an attempt to fit time and space into a single system so space available equals time available and by extension all sorts of other resources.
Classically at the the front of the property the chi is “assembled” into a “pearl” within what is known as the ming tang or Bright Hall. This is where the space should be. Additionally some height is called for at either side. An enclosed apartment even on the ground floor, generally has that. We also want a secure “mountain” at the rear, that is a clear safe back boundary.
* Chuck Spezzano often says: “It only takes one to tango but it has to be you.” And of course he’s right.
As the front was West of South, the rear was East of North. Close to that in the NorthWest, representing the father, there was a garage still full of her Dad’s tut. Lack of partition made it unclear what part of the garden belonged to her and which to the neighbours, so we placed conifers to define the border and agreed to empty the garage. Painful stuff, letting go. I’m not a great fan of evergreens but they make for clear borders.
What fence there was at the rear, was falling over..
“Replace it with something solid at least six feet, ideally eight feet high,” I advised.
We did some work on the rooms inside of course. Her bedroom is going to be very interesting and I applied some abundance band aid to the office.
It will be great to see her out in the world again.
Controversy!
Earlier this year I was in correspondence with a student of one of the world’s most respected Chinese feng shui teachers. She took issue with my observation that external water in the South West often coincides with distressed women. The reason for this – in so far as there are “reasons” – may well be that the Imperial Heaven Stars tin koon, gam dzi(both bad news) are there with bou din in the (current ) 8 Fate. And the South West of course, relates to the mature woman.
The Imperial Heaven Stars are a classical model which a feng shui master may use to orient a house when starting from scratch. They indicate the best locations of doors, site and so on during particular Fate Periods. So a house that was perfectly located in the 7 Fate which most consider ended in 2004, may be suddenly not be so good from then on. To complicate the issue, masters disagree over exactly when Fates begin and end!
Actually this is not as capricious as it sounds because the “good” areas are always good and the bad always bad, they just take one different types of good and bad from time to time. Bou Din, meaning Treasure House, is actually a pretty good area as its name implies; it’s just not a place to put water.
As if by way of illustration, I surveyed Katherine and Tony’s house last week. Katherine sees Roman Legionaires in her daughter’s bedroom. But only when she eats pistacchio nuts. The village shows clear signs of Roman occupation including a name ending in –chester (a corruption of the Roman word for “ camp.”) And the ba chop or permanent external energies speak of ancient stuff lingering.
In the SouthWest of the garden is a water feature. Historically there had been a pond there and the house remains barely above the water table. Ancient energies often linger at ponds. Knowing this, the Celts negotiatied with the Gods by dropping goodies into them.
Katherine has been fed up and Tony has tended to be on the wrong end of it. Don’t construe me as saying this is nothing to do with him. We always have our own responsibility for the situations we find ourselves in. Even men. But also his beloved mother has just developed the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I watched my own epileptic mother’s condition and medication reduce her marble count to zero over thirty years, so I have some idea of the heartbreak.
Katherine told me that her childhood had been punctuated by her mother’s stays in mental institutions. Having many times as a small boy, stood over my mother’s prone form while she returned to her body, I understood some of the strain of this on a child as well. Dostoevsky suggested epilepsy was something to the effect of “ a window to God”. He hadn’t, I guess, come across Alzheimer’s though. Or iatrogenic dementia.
SouthWest water, three distressed women. The plot thickens; I prescribed as I often do, for Katherine to sit in the tai chi and feel. I have described several times this ancient Taoist process which involves letting go of the narrative that we add to our feelings to justify them. If this makes no sense, I am happy to enter into personal correspondence. Mediaeval thinkers called it the Via Negativa.
For the house, I prescribed more prosaically, turfing over the water feature. It may take more than this. We’ll see. For the Romans in the bedroom I am prescribing a jiu shape called a t’ang lung. This is not a breathing disorder.
Feedback is encouraged including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case.
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Richard Ashworth
Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
Names have been changed to protect ..uh…me