Sunday February 4th 2007 13.14
lap chun – Spring Begins
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Sunday February 4th 2007 13.14
Hour Day Month Year
metal earth water fire
xin ji ren ding
wei si yin hai
sheep snake tiger pig
Month: ren yin the water Tiger
Solar Fortnight: lap chun Spring Begins
Introductory Note: The following diary is an unusual one (as well as being very late) and veteran readers may think I’ve lost my marbles while newer ones may decide to block further diaries as spam. I leave that to you but let me reassure you this is exactly how it happened. R
Bananas
Towards the end of his career, Sigmund Freud said: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but I think he was just reassuring himself. Focusing on all that sexual symbolism had probably got a bit tiring.
Sandra is considering taking on new premises which I am to look at today. Her business is day nurseries. This is routine except that a murder took place on the proposed new site, an abandoned school, over Christmas. She wants me to confirm the site is sound.
Before I leave for Sandra’s place, I call into Sainsbury’s. It’s eight in the morning and a security van is outside, presumably collecting cash. Its alarm is going off and a loud recorded voice says: “This is an emergency, please call the Police.” There doesn’t seem to be much going on so I look cautiously into the cabin where the driver is impassively eating a banana as if it were standard procedure.
I buy my petrol, collect my Nectar points and drive on. A friend told me not to get a Nectar card because you end up on databases that know everything about you.
“Identity theft is a very real danger,” she said. “They’ll know your purchasing pattern and everything.”
Frankly I’m looking forward to having an identity worth stealing. Perhaps sometimes a banana is just a banana.
I check the car for energies before I leave it. Breathe in deeply, feel. Sometimes I pick stuff up from a building or a person which sort of sticks. This can be confusing and today it could matter. I say “stuff” because if we keep it metaphorical there are more ways to deal with it. When stuff is defined as a haunting or a curse or a portal or what-have-you, what we can do with it is narrowed down. A haunting wants exorcism, a curse lifting and so on but if we just call it stuck energy, our options remain open.
The rest of my journey, Godalming to
She is American, from
Sandra’s new house in a foliated suburb is still in the chaos of refurbishment. She has yet to place the “castle gate” door to her kitchen. Such doors which in effect create a small porch at an angle to the wall, are a last resort dictated by the complex chi calculation that matches up doors and orientation. They are not as I have read, a chic feng shui feature that everyone should try but the only way to get the correct energy into a stubborn building.
I am here for the first of a series of five ba zi sessions. After that I am to look at Sandra’s office, then the murder scene and finally one of her premises. So there are four jobs; they have me for a day.
Day nurseries are a growth industry but a competitive one. Sandra and her husband Graham’s are safe, happy and creative. As well as preschool learning and a low child-teacher ratio, they offer organic food, after-school facilities for siblings and a stimulating environment from early in the morning to early in the evening 5 days a week.
The ba zi session is intense stuff. We go straight to the opening of her Big Fate, the time a child realises he or she has arrived alone on the planet with a job to do. This is often but not always, triggered by an upsetting event. The Big Fate can start as early as birth (indicating early trauma) or as late as ten which suggests a sheltered upbringing. Sandra’s opens at around six when her mother literally disappeared overnight. One day she was there, the next not. Sandra understood why her mother would deal her father such a blow Like so many – if not all – powerful women her power is related to the discomfort of her relationship with her father. The more powerful the woman, the worse the pain as a rule. Power is a much more subtle thing than having minions at beck and call or a room full of Jimmy Choos. And pain, by the way, is only a reluctance to feel. I don’t insist you agree of course.
Also the more power, the less likely a person may be to acknowledge the gift. There is pain for Sandra in revisiting these incidents. To her credit, although their relationship is strained, she stays in touch with her father and her mother. Unsurprisingly they remain estranged. He has been a recent house guest. She has retreated into the mountains of
Sandra is pretty sanguine. There is distress and tears but she does not flinch. Her stepmother had been a monster and there was more. Violence, blackmail and intimidation. And her father had a story that exonerated him – about his mother and his mother’s father, all the way back to the mytochondrial Eve. The stepmother too. Everybody has a story. The fact is that everyone is responsible, no one is to blame. Once we look at these things squarely we free up immense energy and our lives move on.
We continue. Sandra feels into the root event and I encourage her to breathe.
“Bullet points,” I say.
When we breathe into a feeling the body takes notes even if our mind hasn’t a clue what is going on.
Not of course that this is the first time this very smart woman has looked at these things. Her sparky kids and doting husband as well as her business empire are proof enough of that. But we look at them today perhaps more deeply and more directly.
At the end of the session – the first of five, I invite her to cast a Hexagram from the Book of Changes to set the context for next time. Number 35 Jin Progress. Between 34 Da Zhuang Great Power and 36 Ming Yi, Brightness Obscured. No changing lines so no imminent movement. A narrow path. Interesting. I see something about preferences and priorities in there.
Next is the office across town she shares with Graham and her small staff in a rented apartment. This is the nerve centre of the nursery empire as well as where their kids do their homework. The room they work in themselves is a sleepy South-facing one. Graham confirms that by mid-afternoon he often has trouble staying awake.
“I have to get up and walk around or I nod off,” he tells me.
The Flying Stars or Fei Sin that measure temporary energies between now and 2017, indicate that the empty Eastern room next door will suit them better. Here there is a wide-awake money-making spot. Their huge shared desk fits and I can sit them facing personalised directions that imply success and growth. In addition to all that, the room will accommodate the kids at one end and they have freed up administrative space. Nice light patterns too.
The Flying Stars also show a cyclical arrangement with numbers repeating, together with a 4:1, so-called copy cat configuration.
“There may be odd coincidences here,” I say tentatively. “Not necessarily meaningful, just odd.”
“Like all three of our staff coming from the same school although they were recruited separately?” Sandra asks.
“Yes just like that,” I say.
Don’t you just love it when that happens?
The third job is the crime scene. I am quite nervous about this. I have to be able to feel energies to know what’s wrong and when I have made the difference I intended. I have to be able to perform traditional Chinese calculations in order to explain, to keep records and to apply formulae.
Graham is an ex-detective: “I find it hard to believe anything I can’t explain,” he says. A reasonable position.
“Me too but what’s a belief?”
He considers this then explains that he had been passing the derelict school building – 6,000 square feet spread over three floors – the morning after the murder and had spoken with the rookie putting up the restraining “Police – Do Not Cross” ribbons. So far so CSI. The young policeman had been glad of advice about where to place the various markers.
The three of us walk across the road to the boarded up building. It is a cold frosty day, perhaps two or three degrees above but the sky is as blue as a blackbird’s egg.
The façade is clad in grubby mock-Tudor wood. It seems big for a nursery though not so big for a school. At one end has been added a scrappy extension that does not match and points aggressively at the large building beyond the perimeter wall. This turns out to be a 19th century manor house. It is still intact but time has caught up with it, turning its grounds and lodges into
The extension is a sort of pyramidal lean-to which points straight at the manor. The school has this feature in common with another house I know that hosted a murder. The thing to look for is a pointed extension that appears to snub its neighbour. Usually too big and too close. That is not say that all such properties incite murder. There is a wide variety of methods for human beings to settle their differences.
An eight foot brick wall separates one stretch of harsh tarmac playground from another. Boys & Girls? Seniors and Juniors? Staff and Pupils? Looks a bit random. A single supermarket trolley stands under a netball hoop, surrounded by rubbish and rubble. The other side of the building, what may have been the entrance when it was built in the 1930’s, is too close to the fast road now and only protected from it by a high and skimpy hedge. The barriers, walls and partitions make no sense. What makes even less sense is having an entrance here in the dark soggy
We enter the building. The sharp bright February day disappears, inside is quite dark. We are in the extended bit which is ugly and feels sluggish and nasty. We walk along an echoey corridor. The way the ground-floor space is broken up seems senseless, as if its purpose is simply to restrict the light and keep people apart. The floor is deep in litter.
I have no idea where the murder took place or much about it and I feel pressure on me to know. Squatters, Graham had said. An argument that got out of hand. The energy here on the ground floor, is unpleasant but not so fresh or so unpleasant that it speaks of recent murder. Light falls in low jagged beams through the few broken windows that are not covered. More random partitioning between rooms. There is still writing on the blackboards and a sense of children being handled, disposed of and kept safe but mostly kept out of the way. Not a great feel for a potential nursery.
Sometimes people ask me to assess feng shui rapidly on the spot. Up to a point I can do it but if you want an instant indication, ask what happened to the people who were here before? In this case the answer to that question implies a lot of work for me.
We climb slippery stairs booby-trapped with litter up to the first floor. Again the space is divided laterally and lengthwise with no obvious rationale. None of it feels nice but the orientation NW-SE I assure Sandra, is perfectly sound. The extension will have to go of course and a close look taken at the exits and entrances. I think there is in the Chinese Classics, a proscription against exterior brick walls breaking up land on certain orientations but I’ll have to look it up. And we have to be extremely careful where we dig or make alterations this year.
This is because the NW-SE orientation means the property backs onto the Pig on my Chinese compass and faces the Snake. This in a Pig year, is very distinctive as it means the property backs onto the tai sui which is the most powerful energy there is. Cared for and channelled, this is wonderful, powerful, prosperous chi. Neglected it’s as bad as it gets. This building also once again makes the point that whatever the convention, the Chinese year starts at the Winter Solstice. The murder took place at the darkest point of the new Pig year, between Christmas and the Western New Year and the house backs onto the Pig of 2007 not the Dog of 2006. QED.
I have not yet felt anything that cries out “Murder, here” to me. I wonder if I will. I look out of the window and very very briefly, just for an instant I imagine I see someone pushing the supermarket trolley, an adult playing chariots, back and forth, thumping into the high partition wall in the playground. One blink, a flick and there’s nothing there.
“There’s no one squatting here anymore, is there?” I ask, addressing a sudden dread.
“Uh no,” says Graham with certainty. His is a reassuring presence; intelligent, watchful, linear-minded and 6 foot plus.
I usually feel stuff – people’s feelings, atmospheres, stuff that has lingered in buildings but I rarely see anything off – so to speak – the wall. I’m not very visual actually and my eyesight is poor. This is not an obvious asset for a feng shui man. My sense of direction isn’t great either.
We have covered the second floor and start slowly to climb the 3rd staircase. At the top we turn into a landing. A sudden buzzing, juddering dizziness comes upon me.
“Very disturbed energy right here,” I say. I’m not frightened; in the moment you aren’t are you? But I know something. I can not tell exactly how it has come to me and this is not from my compass which I have not looked at it in the halflight since the ground floor.
“Here,” I say.
Graham gently pushes past me and shines his torch on the wall. There are browny red splashes on the plaster.
“This is where the initial blows landed,” he says with institutional precision. “And that’s where he fell. Blows to the head.”
I am still reeling. I look out of the window and with the corner of my eye I seem to see someone climbing the drainpipe. Bizarrely he is wearing a blue-and white striped tee shirt. An odd detail. I recoil. Now that’s what I call off-the-wall.
I have an image in my mind of a substance-induced derelict trying artlessly to garrotte another with chicken wire. They are both clumsy, shambling messes who have not known true wakefulness for years. These people live in a waking dream not unlike death itself. There is no shape to their lives, no idea of one thing following another, just this haze punctuated by a desperate need to find more stuff to prolong the numbness: cider, lager, turps, it doesn’t matter.
The attacker probably got the garrotting idea from some crap horror film. The assault is too ambitous. He is not strong enough and his victim leaps up in drunken lumbering anger. Self-righteousness is the only emotion within either of their reaches. The victim clubs the would-be assassin with something and follows him down the landing.
There is blue February sky in my eyes. South Eastern light is so beautiful.
“Did he get up?” I ask Graham.
“Yes.” Shining his torch, he shows us to a room down the corridor where there is a lot more blood low down on the wall. There is more vertiginous energy here.
“And this is where he fell,” Graham says.
We are still for a long moment, Graham, Sandra and myself. Everybody feels this stuff.
I have a brought a wooden t’ang lung shape with me, which is like a miniature Cleopatra’s needle. Such a shape forms part of holy buildings the world over. In the ba zhai (or Eight House) system it is an antidote to 5 lien chen, spooky energy. These ones are made for me by my friend Phil, a skilled wood sculptor, in auspicious proportions measured against the traditional lo ban ruler. Of course ideally it would be a natural mountain formation in this shape but if there were one in SW17 these guys wouldn’t be in this mess. Phil will make one for you if you ask him nicely, I expect. He’s not cheap though.
We place the t’ang lung at the spot the first blows fell which feels the most disturbed. All such energy wants, just like you and me, is love and understanding.
“Everyone was someone’s baby once,” I say and Sandra nods. Her eyes are moist. This is a woman whose life’s work is children.
I place around the t’ang lung, a jade Tiger amulet I happen to have brought. The Tiger is the Pig’s secret friend. This is the animal to invoke for help during the Pig year. Not the Pig; Pigs don’t get on.
We take a moment to bless the dead man. I don’t sense he’s taking this all that seriously.
We walk rather faster along the corridors as we leave. The sunlight is a relief.
“Well is it any good?” Graham asks getting straight to the point.
“Oh yes, I would have thought so. Take out the partitions and replace them with something sane. Knock down the extension and make the entrances and exits safe. And I expect we’ll need to take down that wall,” I say indicating the high red brick boundary wall. “We’ll have to careful with timing and where we dig and there’s some serious energy-shifting to do but yes, it’s been waiting a while for this.”
The fourth job is their newest nursery which has had a slow start. Graham drives me there and I walk around. Seems fine to me, it’s just that the chi is not coming through, front to back. There is nothing essentially wrong with the form or orientation.
“It’s the front door, isn’t it?”
I measure the orientation of the door, the middle of three large upvc modules, with my luo pan or Chinese compass. By a compass degree or so, it is sitting on a closed position. This means the chi is not getting in.There are healthy open positions (or kwas) either side. The nearest is literally one degree of orientation away.
“We can move it then?” asks Graham in his can-do sort of way.
“I’m not sure,” I say warily eying the door frame. You’d have to shift the whole bloody thing. “Let’s do a bit of maths.”
Pythagoras’ theory allows you to calculate the amount of movement that a degree calls for given the width of the door. I can do this stuff. My mental arithmetic is actually pretty good. I just don’t like it. That part of my mind sort of hurts.
“About half a centimetre.”
“That’s not much.”
“It might as well be a kilometre if we have to dig out the whole thing.”
I’m not usually this defeatist; it has been a long day. Then a thought strikes me. I push the door. It’s not closing properly. Despite its size and robustness, it rattles when I push it. We open it wide and look at the catch. It’s half-a-centimetre too far back. An easy job.
“Twenty minutes with a screwdriver,” Graham says and he is right.
Don’t you just love it when that happens?
That night I am to pick up my eldest daughter Jessie from her acting class. She’s studying for a LAMDA qualification in-between movies. It keeps her off the street. Off The Street too.
As I get in the car, I feel something behind me on the rear passenger seat. A weak energy; mean and pathetic.
“You don’t know you’re dead, do you?” I suggest gently. “But think about it. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t would you?”
I can feel an alcoholic confusion spinning in my head. He (it?) has not been happy for so long. But he doesn’t even know that. Alive and sozzled, dead, what’s the difference? Well instantaneous transport for one thing. He was daft, drunk and recalcitrant in life and so he is in death. Carefully, slowly, I wish him well. Everybody was somebody’s baby once.
Then I feel a sting at my windpipe as if someone with the strength of a baby is pulling cotton tight around my throat.
“Out,” I say firmly and open the passenger door. A beat. Then I drive on to pick up Jessie. There is a copy of the Guardian on the front passenger seat with a picture of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in a clinch.
You have so much more my father used to say, to fear from the living than the dead.
I cover the fortunes of the animals in 2007 on my myspiritradio show: http://www.myspiritradio.com/3-ashworthr.html; in March.
My new super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and
my book The Feng Shui Diaries is out now!
If you’re feeling rash you can order it 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 ,
Waterstones www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)
or indeed Tescos.
Names have been changed.
Richard Ashworth