Sunday January 6th 2008 07.21
Misses, Dales, Diary
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Sunday January 6th 2008 07.21
Hour Day Month Year
Metal wood water earth
Geng yi quai mow
Zhen si chou tze
Dragon snake ox rat
Month: quai chou the water Ox
Solar Fortnight: siu hohn Slight Cold
Misses, Dales, Diary
Feng shui, as Howard Choy is fond of remarking, is doing the right thing at the right time in the right place. To everything there is a season.
Now is the grey phase between midwinter and the New Year. Nobody knows what day it is. This is not a dynamic time. The sun is new but the moon is still waning. This is the season of mending and resting. In the Northern Hemisphere we expect to put on weight to take us through to spring when the vegetables will sprout again and the cattle graze. Not I imagine, that this comforts the neighbours when they hear 13 stone of unsightly feng shui man bouncing on the trampoline at 5am. This is the rest period between the Solstice when the sun dies and is born again and February’s Spring Festival announces that the year is truly alive. Outside in the bitter cold the bulbs are already ahead of themselves.
Feng shui is often used to select auspicious dates for events such as weddings and the erection of buildings. The purpose of the selection is to find a moment with good chi and “stretch” it across the whole of a process. A well-augured wedding day is intended to carry the good fortune across the duration of the marriage. The same applies to business ventures: start as you mean to carry on. Sometimes the timing of something that is not arranged tells us a great deal about the state of the world.
So I pay particular attention to Donna when she calls apologetically on the 31st Dec knowing I am off-duty.
“Sorry to interrupt your break,” she says.
What happens at its opening often represents the tone of the whole year. This will come as no comfort in Pakistan or Edmonton and perhaps significantly (but perhaps not) I am listening to the Bee Gees’ Too Much Heaven on itunes when she calls. I am actually fussing over my 2008 Forecasts; paper everywhere. Someone declutter this chaos. Somewhere in there is the note I made, on a plane between Hong Kong and Singapore in October, in recognition that January 1948 was the 60th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination: “Bhutto or Musharraf?” I wrote in my Moleskine. As it happens Benazir Bhutto drew the short straw.
I love the Bee Gees. Sorry but there it is. Even the hairdryer years. “Love is such a beautiful thing” they are singing, as I pick up the phone, with absolute lack of irony and the closeness that only common dna allows.
Assassinations, misery, disasters: I could do, frankly, without such stark questions. My purpose is to leave people happier than I find them. I struggle each year to be sure what use such information is in the great scheme of things. Each of us is responsible for his own world. Nothing is forced on us. A warning is helpful but where does prescience end and creation begin?
“Sorry,” Donna says, “But we’ve found a house and we have to make up our minds by Wednesday.” She sounds so bright, quite unlike the hesitant woman, wired with anxiety, I travelled to Yorkshire to meet early in 2007. It turns out the house is a one-in-a-million opportunity; out in the Dales, detached, remote and full of character. There is even a waterfall in the garden.
“I’ve always wanted one.”
“Me too,” I enthuse, thinking of the Abhorsen’s house under the river in Garth Nix’s Sabriel.* Someone pulled out, she tells me, and the Estate Agent has said it’s all theirs until the 2nd.
When we met she was afraid even to go outside. Both her neighbours were bullying her – a common phenomenon in the Pig year – and she felt oppressed by the estate she lived on. The elderly bloke on the Dragon side would stand at his front door arms folded and stare balefully at her while the single women on the other side thumped the walls. We tamed this gently with goy moon shapes. For the old boy it was frankly goy moons or sectioning. And he had his own heartbreak of course.
That day we talked at length about Donna’s nervousness. I use these vague terms – anxiety, nervousness – rather than more specific ones because I am wary of boxing people; a human being only goes into a box for one reason. I’m more comfortable dealing with the fact that you were a bit nervous yesterday than that you suffer from panic attacks or that you have felt miserable this winter than that you are a victim of Seasonal Affective Disorder and so on. Not because I don’t advise medical attention which calls for such definitions, only that it isn’t what I do.
“I get so nervous,” she said with her hands spread symmetrically on the kitchen table.
* Do read it: in the same area of country as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
She is a powerful and loving woman not all of whose fears are unfounded. Just because you’re paranoid after all, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. She had had a hard time. Her ex-husband had been unable to protect her from his possessive family and when it had come to a choice between the two, had plumped for mother. A period of serious disruption had followed for her and her two small boys before she met Graham her new young husband, a man with a heart as wide as the Locksley Valley.
The antidote to anxiety is trust. Feel what you feel, keep your eye on the ball and get out of the way. This is the tao.
And she had as Lency Spezzano would say, come by her upset honestly. So she agreed to trust. Enough of this emotional self-harm. Our feelings don’t always mean very much.
The estate they had lived on was built on land that had been mined and refilled. The dragon of the landscape was weak: the chi was floppy, lacking snap, like cardboard that had been left out in the rain. There were irregular mounds and dips in the tarmac. This was a dismal place, not good for anybody to live.
“We’ve got to get away,” Graham said. “And nobody wants to buy the house.”
Although it was on the Estate Agents’ books hardly anyone had even been to view it and no one for several months. Given a brief, we might have worked on healing the neighbourhood but I had limited time and that was not what I had travelled half a day to achieve. So with a bit of mumbo-jumbo and a lot of intention, we freed up the energy and it was sold inside a month.
In the next few weeks they found a place to rent and new schools for Donna’s boys. Graham fitted the bulk of the packing into his already-tight schedule. Kahlil Ghibran called work “love made visible.”
At that time, to be offered a free hit at a detached house out in the Dales with only a distant gentleman farmer for a neighbour, would have been a dream come true. Since dreams coming true is exactly what I’m looking for, I am less surprised that they have this opportunity than that they are hesitating.
In May they took several brave steps into the unknown and their lives transformed. Why hesitate now? Is this a theme for the year?
“Does where the waterfall is matter?” she asks me.
“Well of course.”
The water appears from the online spec and Donna’s description, to be in the South West which for many is the correct location. Her first impression, she tells me, was the sound of the water.
“It’s quite close to the house.”
“How close?”
“Twelve feet or so.”
“What’s it like in front?”
“Level and open.”
I’m mentally ticking boxes and the waterfall is a very unusual feature and ideally I’d like to go there and inspect it but I’m not going to do that in the timescale.
“Behind?”
“Level then slope; it’s the Dales.”
Rear mountain sounds okay then. Real feng shui; wind you can feel and mountains you can climb. The more urban a home is, generally the more the feng shui calls for precision and intention. I look forward to visiting it on a wild Yorkshire day when the wind is high.
According to many, the South West is the correct location for water. In the 8 Fate (1996-2017 or 2004-2024 depending on which school you follow) the chi comes down from the mountain in the North East and settles on the water in the South West. So place it right there. I choose to trust too; I reassure her that if we both trust the process, I will come up and iron out the kinks when they’re settled.
There is a sort of law about feng shui that we take our improvements with us. If we make a home better and then sell it, we are often surprised to find that particular problem solved in the next house. Many times I have surveyed a brand new bigger, better home and found it from my standpoint, just like the previous one but with improvements.
As far as I can tell life seems to consist of lessons attached to feelings. Why we should be presented with lessons, I really don’t know and I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks they do. For our own reasons we call some of these emotions negative and some of them positive. If we embrace them they don’t last long. It may be that happiness is fleeting because we rush out to greet it and it is gone. And it may be that pain tends to persist because we run from it and it won’t be run from. What we resist, as they say, persists. Feeling our emotions is much less painful than not feeling them. The pain is not in the feeling but in the not-feeling.
This perhaps makes the waterfall an opportunity.
What I suggest to Donna is that she can expect upset for the first six to nine months after they move in but that this is really just the landscape reflecting what is already so. This will require no more courage than she has already shown. I remind her what a brave and powerful woman she is. Her boys and her husband are testimony to that. The South West is the place of the Mother, kun. Water metaphorically cleanses the earth of the mother. I will come up in the Spring and do some mumbo-jumbo to restrict the water’s effect. Then I too can get out of the way and let her dreams come true.
Richard Ashworth © 2008
Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.