Thursday April 5th 2007 12.27
ching ming – Clear and Bright
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
ThursdayApril 5th 2007 12.27
Hour Day Month Year
metal earth wood fire
geng ji chia ding
wu si zhen hai
horse snake dragon pig
Month: chia zhen the wood Dragon
Solar Fortnight: ching ming Clear and Bright
Home is where the heart is
Rabbit month always changes to Dragon month on the 5th April. Same as the British tax year. All other Chinese months vary by at least a day in either direction from year to year. For the Chinese the only constant is change, for us death and the tax man.
Toni knocks on my office door first thing. She think she was due at 9am and I thought it was 9.30. I am confused when she apologises for being late at ten past. She is three sessions into her ba zi series. We have identified some heavy-duty Daddy stuff. Her father was neglectful, charismatic and now dead. Consequently or otherwise she has a misplaced respect for the sort of business ethic he stood for: no nonsense, business is business. She runs a gentle Mind Body Spirit store and the two approaches are hard to integrate. People come to her because her shop feels full of love. The last thing they want is staff hurrying about like gerbils. She knows this and readily sees the confusion. She is an exquisitely sensitive woman with a gift for gentle honest communication. The world needs more like her.
Technically she is a water rat (ren tze) with a yin water (gui) day stem. Water generally being thought of as communication, you would expect her to be able to talk.
Toni may be a good example of what is called the middle path. This is not, I think, so much about moderation in all things as an awareness of the patterns we fall into unconsciously, combined with a preparedness to choose a way that is not a pattern but may absorb elements of it. When we are born we are presented with two broad patterns: Mummy and Daddy. And broadly, we choose one or the other. Then broadly we say either yes or no to the pattern. After that it gets complicated. The Chinese system with its yin and yang and light and dark polarities looks like a yes/no system but it isn’t. It’s a way of mapping the robotic patterns so that we may choose from beyond them if we will. A water rat with a gui day stem can be garrulous, quiet or by turns one or the other. This is choice. People are not robots and we can choose. Toni has so much heart; she is strong and gentle.
Next day I take a train to the Midlands where I am to survey a factory. It is an unusual business run by powerful women and I arrive an hour early to get a good look before I meet them. Sometimes the hardest thing about feng shui is doing it while you hold a conversation. On the other hand people are entitled to value and narrative is part of it. Not knowing that it is another building I am to look at (not that it matters, metaphor is metaphor is metaphor) I inspect the front from the outside. It’s a bright day and the water fountain outside reception with its three streams is dazzling in the light.
There are nine discs along the fascia. This means wealth. It is the same principle as Chinese banks using red lettering on a white background as house colours. The 9 fire melts the metal discs into liquid money. This begins to look like very conscious feng shui from the ground up. I walk all round the building.
I usually turn my phone off when I am working but it is still on and it bleeps at me. My daughter Henni is texting me from Osaka in Japan where she is enjoying the unusual experience of being of average height. I tell her (incorrectly, I find out) that I am in the Black Country. “Sounds bleak,” she texts. As it turns out, it is raining in Osaka and sub-tropical here. I couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful day had I been presented with a menu.
There is water at chou in the North East and the building faces soen on the Southeast intercardinal point as well as having a rear entrance at yuw in the West. This is the yang metal Double Mountain water formation of Grandmaster Yang, the most influential of all feng shui masters who made off with the Azure Bag of secrets from the Tang Emperor’s court in the 7th century. Curiouser and curiouser.
I am met by Tracey, a glamorous lady of a certain age. She is sweet and open and takes me to another unoccupied building nearby which turns out to be the problem.
This building has resisted all attempts to lick it into shape. It is still empty after some months and the refurbishment keeps stalling. We walk round and a picture emerges. First of all it is heartless; that is to say that the tai chi or heart is in the car park. This happens with certain floor plans, the most notorious being the so called hatchet shape. The tai chi is found where the longest length and the widest width intersect. When it falls outside the building there is often bitterness within; literally heartlessness. Couples in homes like this tend not to get on.
There are workmen wiring and plastering. Pacing out the tai chi I place a £2 coin to mark the depth axis. When I return it is gone. In the corner of the big room there is a man fussing over a false ceiling.
“That happens all the time,” I tell Tracey. “Usually it’s 20p.”
“Not your lucky day, then,” she says.
“Depends what you count as luck. It’s generally on the upmarket jobs I lose £2 coins.”
Tracey tells me about her husband and her daughters and her journey from art college to here. She takes notes in a degree of detail that demonstrates both conscientiousness and fascination with feng shui. Early in our tour I feel a single twinge in my body. I know this is not mine which probably makes it hers.
There is another thing wrong with the building.Well it isn’t wrong yet but it will be. They are about to place a water fountain at the South West intercardinal point. This worries me. Orthodox practice differs but of the three mountains at the South West I avoid two. Traditional theory says that in the (current) 8 Fate, height and weight should be at the North East and water opposite in the South West. I have found that water at kun, due South West, co-exists with distress among women. This is water washing earth: uncomfortable, not to be chosen with eyes closed and especially not here.
Some people do choose it; some people want to go through stuff which can lead to great awareness but it is not usually consistent with concentration on the business plan.
At the other mountain wei, the Goat, South of South West, is the Heaven Star bou din which means treasure. We don’t put water here because it drains the treasure. Duh!
I tell Tracey this and she asks what they should do about it.
“Don’t turn on the water,” I say.
“Could it go somewhere else?” she asks.
Well yes. My advice if you want to give an empty building, especially a big one like this, some oomph is to place fountains in the South East. This, unlike kun and wei, is on the yang or lively side of the compass. In years of trial, error and theory I have identified just two spots to place water for such a purpose. One of these lies in the Snake and therefore cannot be used in 2007 as the Snake must not be disturbed in a Pig year. The other uh….doesn’t. We locate this spot and another diametrically opposite for weight and height. The water assembles the chi (that is energy, life, what have you) that descends from the height (sometimes confusingly also called the mountain).
“Place a stone there,” I say, gesturing at the far corner.
“Just a stone?” she asks.
“A big stone,” I say.
“How big?”
“Very big,” I say, “Could be a Buddha.”
“Not sure about Buddhas,” she says.
“But this is white-hot multicultural Britain,” I say.
We settle on a very large stone.
A second twinge.
We have created an axis of chi that runs straight across the building from corner to corner. I have used this a dozen times to move houses, flats and other empty buildings.
For good measure we locate the very top of the building where I place a tang lung shape, just inside the roof. I show Tracey that the unprepossessing wooden sculpture is showing red (for fortuitous) for every one of its half dozen dimensions when measured against my lo ban ruler.
“Now you know why Lillian Too’s books are such weird shapes.”
We walk back downstairs. On each floor there is an isolated South Western room which defies useful purpose and there is a huge oak tree far too close to the building where the South Western edge meets the Western. Primarily South West means mother or mature woman. Now I know what the twinge is. There is a clear quartz crystal in my briefcase. I get it out and put it in my jacket pocket where I can touch it. Now not everybody subscribes to the notion that crystals can be programmed but a clear quartz will do what it’s told anyway. I start the process by simply fingering it in my pocket as we talk.
“Finally,” I say to Tracey, “I want you to get a very big rose quartz and place it on the ground floor directly under the tang lung.” Directly under proves to be out in the open in a public area.
“I’m not sure I want to put a big crystal there,” she says presumably alluding to the £2. We’re certainly getting some value from that coin. I point to the Ladies just feet from the correct spot.
“I think it’ll be safe there, don’t you?”
Job done, we return to the main building. Tracey orders me in a sandwich. It turns out the building was refurbished by a feng shui aware architect and has been attended to by a well-known practitioner (currently hors de combat) ever since. She asks me how I got into feng shui. I tell her about Jungian psychology, archetypes and the healing power of metaphor and while I am talking, I feel her attention fall away. There is a feeling of despair.
“What was that?” I ask, “That hopelessness. You thought of something distressing.”
Well I was banging on a bit.
“A health scare,” she says. “Will I be alright?”
“Oh yes,” I say with certainty. It’s a humbling question.
She asks about crystals. I am far from an authority. I use half-a-dozen or so with some regularity and consult experts when I am out of my depth. Tourmaline I use to control woo-woo™ stuff, rose quartz for relationship, moldavite for magic, rhodochrosite and haematite for girly stuff but a clear quartz, the vanilla of crystals, will do exactly what it is told. Wash them I tell her, leave them out at the new moon to bring things about, the full moon to be rid of things and above all programme them, talk to them. It’s all intention, someone said to me. No it’s not, if it were we could use potatoes as effectively as moldavite. This is a paradox. Form and formless. We can’t pin these things down. Except when we can of course. This is the Tao.
Later we hurry around the various departments, all uniformly busy, all uniformly overcrowded. I meet the m/d, a very beautiful lady whose age I couldn’t have begun to guess had I not done her ba zi. Her secret will die with me.
The accounts department calls for a re-think which I rise to. Like so much feng shui, when you can see the whole picture it’s very simple. The powers-that be will not shunt a soon-to-retire executive along in order to make the rearrangement work straight away which I can not help but respect. There is plenty of heart in this building.
The Head of Accounts is a Snake. The Snake is under pressure during a Pig year and as it happens I have a Tiger amulet for her to wear to invoke the Tiger’s intercession with the Pig. Sounds fatuous but there you are.
I return to the problem building to do some mumbo-jumbo with the tai chi.
Then we debrief. The boss asks about Tracey’s health and for the second time today I am reassuring. I give Tracey her clear quartz to which I have given instructions. Having heard about the Tiger amulet, the boss asks whether she is to be the only one without a present. I stutter apology; none of this is preplanned. Of course she is only winding me up.
On the way back I take by mistake a train that terminates at Dorridge, a town I have never heard of. There is a half-hour wait for my train. I sit on the slatted bench in the evening sunlight, set my i-pod to shuffle and doze. My Blackberry squeaks like R2D2 for attention but I ignore it. It’s a long way home and sooner or later I will not be able to stop myself checking my messages.
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