Saturday February 4th 2006 07.25
Lap Chun: Spring Begins
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Lap Chun: Spring Begins
Solar fortnight beginning:
Saturday February 4th 2006 07.25
Hour Day Month Year
earth wood metal fire
wu chia geng bing
chen tse yin xu
dragon rat tiger dog
Month: geng yin, the Metal Tiger.
Solar Fortnight: Lap Chun: SpringBegins
Fire Dog & Metal Tiger
This is the first solar fortnight or chi of the Fire Dog as it is generally reckoned. My predictions appear at length elsewhere but suffice it to say that the Fire Dog represents consistency and reliability with moments of explosion.
The year opens with a metal Tiger month which is inherently conflicted because a Tiger is wooden and metal attacks wood. The French Sinologist de Kermadec bypasses this problem by concentrating on the lap yum, the term that expresses the two together. For geng yin, this would be Pine Tree wood, reliable and tough but remote, So this is an exacting month whichever way we look at it. Geng is perfectionist and chen, yin and chia wilful. High standards are demanded. February can be drab, very often it’s when the brand new year starts to look as tarnished as the old one. Already some of us are under pressure. And we need to remember that in order for us to be under anything we have to believe there is something or someone on top. In order to be under the circumstances we have to agree to that position. This is a tricky month that may call for some readjustment. Standard advice is that the South, SouthEast, West and tai chi may need attention. If you feel the need for fine-tuning let me know.
Good Form is Good Feng Shui
One thing I was reminded of in China was the importance of landscape form. When you see the “pearl” of chi settling where vast mountain ranges meet, it is brought home that without considering the landscape, feng shui can be just arranging tents in a tempest.
So moving house this month (133, Peperharow Road, Godalming, GU7 2PW – all other contact details remain the same) I once again take my life in my hands.
It is important that I look after my own feng shui – physical, spiritual and ethical – which may allow me to look after yours.
My wife recognised the house first. I needed the measurements to back me up. We have a chequered history with this; the house before last I advised against and it was a nightmare, the day we moved to the next one, Channel Five rang offering me a tv series. This time my daughter Jessie landed a major movie part and I got a book deal, literally as we moved.
How much does the pure act of shifting energy sweep out the cobwebs? I don’t know but then I don’t believe in causality at all. But the form of this house – steep hill behind, slopes either side and gentle decline at the front down to a rivulet flowing in yang clockwise motion – is as close to the Imperial sites in China as I have seen. And on a North-South axis slightly off the compass point which is just about perfect.
And as for causality; of course I subscribe to gravity so as to avoid falling over and the conventions of physics are handy. But it seems to me that although everything is clearly connected, the order of that connection is far from clear.
With my wife and two teenage daughters’ permission, my office has been placed in the NorthWest, the area of authority, facing South. As they say, the meek shall inherit the earth – that is if it’s alright with everybody else. We have had the odd skirmish with the furniture but that’s settling now.
World of Woo-Woo
I was called in this week by Vi who had been plagued by mysterious wet patches in her house. One in the front room by the tv was nowhere near a pipe or even a window. She has like Roger Miller, no pool no pets, so there was not an obvious linear explanation. There is a ruined Cistercian Abbey nearby. Many of their wells still function so it is possible there subterranean water but that doesn’t explain a flood on the first floor!
At one edge of this fairly large house was an incongruous extension, built by the previous occupants. It was only yards from the neighbour, unnecessarily close. Building it had been making some sort of point. It was a very aggressive feature, like a pointing gesture, frozen in brick.
In the extension, which was a utility room with even its own two doors impeding each other, there was some sort of residual energy. If we deal with such things as metaphors and try not to pin them down too much as ghosts or malevolence or whatever, we do not reduce the means by which we can deal with them. This particular energy appeared to be female and short on humour. I could feel the corners of my mouth being drawn down. And the accent I heard had flat ‘a’s in it
“The people here before you, were they Northern?”
“Yes, they were,” said Vi. I took a deep breath to get further in touch.
“It’s a sulk.”
Sulks are not unusual in people or in stuck energies and I don’t mean to imply they’re regional either. We’re all either in bliss or sulking, pretty much all the time. But some more than others. When we stop sulking we disappear in a puff of smoke, I think.
.“Still alive?”
“I expect so; they weren’t that old.”
She confirmed there had been friction between her predecessors and the neighbours.
I placed a t’ang lung shape in the utility room and gave her some crystals and some mumbo-jumbo to do and asked her to call me in a month. I left realising that if we had insisted on a haunting we might have had nothing to work with at all or we might have been talking in hushed voices around the “ghost” of someone still living.
As I drove away I realised that I had described both Vi and her husband, born in 1961, as “Rabbits”. You are of course Oxen, Vi, although as I am generally at pains to point out, the Year animal is only an aspect of a ba zi which describes the moment of our birth.
I make mistakes but this is a very basic one. It’s always meaningful when I am particularly stupid.
Lillian Too’s World of Feng Shui.
Feng shui is big business in Singapore and Malaysia. Stars like Lillian Too and Joey Yap fill huge halls with their seminars and workshops. Interestingly I attended a (very modest) workshop with Lillian Too in London in the mid-90’s. She was, in my judgement, a sweet, gracious, wise woman.
These days she publishes a magazine, Feng Shui World which I love. It’s loud, colourful and brash and full both of offers for glitzy knick-knacks and useful advice. In tandem her daughter Jennifer runs a huge retail franchising operation called World of Feng Shui.
Reading the magazine this month I gained new insight into why feng shui should be so commercial in South East Asia and so low key in the UK.
There was an article on Martha Stewart who if truth were told, is probably a personal friend of Ms Too. US entrepreneur, Mrs Stewart, you may recall, was jailed briefly for financial misbehaviour. Now she is out and back with her own tv show and lifestyle magazine up and running again.
The article traces Martha’s fortunes in relation to her personal feng shui, her ba zi (or paht chee). It shows how her incarceration reflects her elemental balance. The ba zi shows she was always going to be in trouble at this point in her career. The clash between her “self” character and her “fate pillars” illustrates this.
But there is no suggestion in the article that her disgrace had anything to do with her behaviour. It, in point of fact, asserts that she was not jailed for insider trading which is what most of us – including me – understood but for lying to the investigators.
I guess these self-made billionaires must stick together.
On the other hand there is something rather crucial missing here. I think it is an awareness of paradox. We do not need to choose between believing in Martha’s accountability and her ba zi. Both can be true. The paradox is that the accuracy of her ba zi does not make her either a victim of fate or innocent of the charges. She like the rest us, remains responsible for her actions.
Paradox can be difficult because it involves holding two apparently contradictory ideas at once but it is a short route to wisdom. Paradox challenges the mind. How can we have free will as well as an innate character? Similarly, it seems to me, we enjoy choice as well as a heritage of dna, accountability as well as destiny. If we forget we are the ones choosing, we become robots at the mercy of fate. Conversely if we forget we are part of the tao we can easily hallucinate that we have a control over the universe that is just not available to human beings. Even self-made billionaires.
The article appears to imply that if you get your feng shui right you can get away with anything. Not only do I not believe that, I don’t want to believe it. We can do remarkable things with no linear explanation but we remain responsible. At the heart of miracles, of magic, of truly practical feng shui is the humility of this knowledge. To miss one or the other is to not be balanced. This I think, may be the tao.
And the magazine, as I said is wonderful. I heartily recommend it. But let’s stay aware that we are responsible
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