Thursday August 23rd 2007 20.57
The Toad less Ravelled
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Thursday August 23rd 2007 20.57
Hour Day Month Year
wood earth earth fire
chia ji wu ding
xu chou shen hai
dog ox monkey pig
Month: wu shen the earth Monkey
Solar Fortnight: chu shu Limit of Heat
The Toad less Ravelled
In the lobby of my house there is a metal toad with a coin in his mouth. This is what I’d tend to call a folk-remedy as opposed to feng shui. There is no elemental basis for it. The toad’s job is to catch money in his mouth as it enters the house.This morning I turn him to face the door as I leave at 5.30am. He keeps the same work hours as me so he faces the wall at weekends and on public holidays too. I find that turning him round when I finish work helps me switch off. He may well feel the same.
At this time of day I’m rarely keen on eating but today I make an exception and eat two pieces of toast. Then to complete this I seek out what may be the single greatest creation of the human mind: Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup in a squeezy bottle.
Today I am off to see Zachary who is a talented and ambitious man. Meanwhile I can celebrate finding a house for Sophia.
We have inspected eight. She wants something to suit her and be inviting for her grown children. It should be suburban; not too close to London and not too far. Safe, not too remote but not too close either to a road or a railway line. And she wants perfect feng shui.
I told her that choosing the right house is like falling in love; if you have to ask, you aren’t. I told her also about the Ming Prince Zhao who found the site for his tomb at Longquan in Hubei Province when he was out hunting at the age of 27 and did not occupy it until he was 60-odd. That’s how unusual perfect feng shui is. Several of his concubines handily died the same week as him, as it happens.
The previous house we looked at was nicely open to the Snake at the front with a good solid mountain at the Pig at the rear. This orientation – opposing the tai sui or year energy – meant 2007 would not have been the best for the owners but this did not need to concern her as she would not move in before December. Anyway we know already that divorce was the reason for sale. The husband was handling things and had turned three offers down already.
“Very difficult man, “ the lady from the Estate Agents said. “Very controlling.”
On my list of feng shui criteria to consider when purchasing – my Home Identification Pack (or HIP Replacement) – I suggest that a purchaser finds out what happened to the previous incumbents. Divorce doesn’t sound too great.And in point of fact there was some very odd feng shui here: a housewide extension at the back meant the garden could only be entered through the house. Very controlling. This house was rejected after the survey came back with serious damp.
Sophia was widowed in 1994. She is a very beautiful Greek lady who married a handsome English salesman. His death in his forties leaving three young children, threw a hand grenade into the family. The eldest son, the youngest child, is a sweet talented bloke who just can’t work out what to do with his life. Their eldest daughter had a recent skirmish with cancer – at 29 – and the youngest is prone to hysterics at the mention of his name.
They are good-hearted sweet people; the kids are bright and beautiful and Sophia is gracious and kind. But they are sort of rivetted together. She is so involved in their lives that she can’t get on with her own and there is constant unresolved squabble as if all four are in search of a referee. And no one as I keep reassuring her, is to blame. We’re all doing our best and blame is neither truthful nor any use to anybody.
When we looked round this previous house, I looked at the orientations of the kid’s bunks and said to the agent:
“They’re fighting over the kids.”
“No,” she said, “They’re only his.”
“I rest my case.”
Sophia understood even if it didn’t help her make up her mind.
Finding a balance as a parent is hard enough in a nuclear family. With the father gone it becomes close to impossible. Those who want to blame gun crime on immigration or lack of discipline have overlooked the central reason for rudderless children: absent fathers. As a man who left a wife and three children I know a bit about this. I have been fortunate that my sons have been able to forgive me and I am close to them all. Kahlil Ghibran wrote: “When your children are grown, make them your friends.”
We don’t get dummies to practise on and parenting adults is a bigger mystery even than parenting minors. There are no books, no dvds, no folk wisdom.
Sophia has had to do this on her own and a pretty good job she has done of it. Sometimes at night she breaks down and shouts at her 13-years dead spouse for his lack of consideration.
But now we have found a house she wants to buy. Thank the Lord. She rings often to draw auspicious dates from me, nervous that something will go wrong. The kitchen is poorly placed, I have told her; it is in too good a position in the ba zhai or Eight House model. What we want is for a kitchen to “burn up” the bad chi. It’s a terrible waste to burn good chi. On the other hand we want the cooker mouth (oven door generally) to open towards a good ba zhai direction which indeed it does. In vastu shasta, incidentally, the Indian feng shui, cookers are restricted to an arc from East to South and hers does pass this test.
“Does it suit the children?” she asked anxiously.
“All you really need is a floor they can crash on. They’re all grown, Sophia.”
She knows this but it is so hard for her.
We have been looking for an East-facing house for a variety of reasons, including that her ba zi is short of the wood that comes from this direction. Included in what wood represents are movement and healing. This wound has been open a long time. The house is West facing but it’s not much of a trick to draw the wood into it. What is unique to East-West houses is that the centre Flying Stars are 1:6 which is mou kuk, the General: a way to describe this is that it is father energy even when there is no father present. I’ll settle for that. Fingers crossed while she instructs a full structural survey.
Zachary is a big noise in local government. He was brought up by his Mum in a two-up two down in Nottingham. She is dead now but he has a 1st in Psychology and a big future. He still supports half-siblings in Jamaica. Right now we’re rearranging his gutters in keeping with the Water Dragon Classic. Make the rain water flow in the right direction and out at the right place and fame and fortune is yours is the idea. This is the sort of work the great masters of Malaysia and Taiwan gained their millionaire-making reputations for and the fact is that since we have been working together Zach is an ever-bigger noise and pretty soon he might even be able to commit to a relationship.
He is very matter-of-fact.
“I’ve noticed whenever you do something here, something changes in my life. It’s almost as straightforward as that.”
I’m flattered but I think his talent and good will have something to do with this.
“Just remember me when you have real power,” I say “Or give me a proportion of your increased income instead of paying my fees.”
He looks at me deadpan.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course; when wasn’t I?”
He drives me to the Station at Petts Wood and puts me on the train.
While I am on the empty train, Hortense calls. She is upset. Her little boy can’t go to the school she wants him to attend.
“They say we have choice,” she says “But what sort of choice is this?”
She tells me the little boy is not focused. If your Dad were doing 5-to-10 you might not be either.
“How angry is he?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t really tell me.”
“And how do feel about that?”
“Frustrated.”
“I’d call that anger, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well the good news is that we can work with yours and change his.”
“I see…I think.”
“We can’t really change anybody else. Or we can and we can’t. It’s a paradox. When we change ourselves the world changes and most particularly those close to us.”
“Is that a quotation?”
“I don’t think so; I usually attribute.”
“Sounds familiar. Gandhi?”
“Michael Jackson? Maybe Richard Pryor – the greatest of the urban philosophers.”
I point out that I have just had almost the same wrong-school-for-my-boy conversation with Hortense’s grown-up daughter Lutetia. Applying for a move earlier than the first day of term would have shortened the odds.
“Contagious huh?”
Later that week I visit them both.
Hortense lives in St Pauls in Bristol where kids trade hallucinogenics within yards of her house. When they linger outside her gate she wanders out with her slippers on and tells then they can’t do that there. And move on they do. She wants to move house but mostly she does not want it like this anywhere, dope-dealing youths on the swings in the playground with God-knows what concealed under their hoodies. I am speechless with respect; this is a hard row to hoe.
Hortense’s ba zi suggests she should apply for a University Degree. She’s underqualified but she’s smart enough and if she is to make the change she wants to make, she needs to know more than the syllabus of the school of hard knocks. And she needs to network above her peer group. No amount of hand-on-the-hip grieving will change this. I give her some names and do some serious mumbojumbo to her house.
Lutetia presents herself as needy and stubborn but each time I challenge her and set her tasks, she rises to them. Right now there is a mirror in her front room that needs placing. Its purpose, in keeping with an obscure feng shui formula, is to open up the front door so that the chi held in her carefully-positioned water feature has a chance to filter into the house.
Her ba zi shows she has made some poor choices in men. She shares with many women the self-destructive delusion that blokes fall into two categories: reliable or sexy. The groups, the delusion goes, are entirely separate, a Venn diagram with no intersection. What sort of self-destructive silliness is this? She asks me what to do.
“You need to choose a man who is worth the trouble,” I tell her. “He is unlikely to be flashy or stand out from the crowd. It’s your job to make him sexy. You need to see the spark and fan it.”
She is not a size ten but she is quite beautiful.
“How would I feel beautiful?” she asks. This is a brave and touching question.
“See the spark in others and fan it. You see theirs; they can’t miss yours. Take an unprepossessing man, dress him, shave him, trust him. Your friends won’t know where he came from even if they’ve known him all their lives. You kiss the frog, he becomes a prince. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” she says quizzically, “Like the fairy stories?”
“Exactly. But remember; when you kiss the frog he becomes a prince, he always was a prince, you didn’t do it and you can’t change him back.”
She shakes her head bewildered.
“That’s confusing.”
“This is the Tao or rather it would be were it not for the fact that the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. Except when it is of course.”
“That’s even harder.”
“No it’s not.”
For both of these dignified hardworking women there is work to do on the feng shui recommendations I left behind me last time. I have made changes that will smooth Hortense’s progress but she needs to do her bit. The restless yik ma which generally means “house move” is in the right place in her ba zi but she could waste it on fretting.
When I return home the coin has fallen from the toad’s jaws.
“Hard day?” I ask turning him to the wall and returning the coin to his mouth
There is a message on the office phone; the survey on Sophia’s house has shown up some expensive problems. She wants to look some more. I feel a bit like Sancho Panza but I’m sure we will find the right place.
Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..
Richard Ashworth