Thursday March 20th 2008 14.10

Something Stupid

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diaries

Solar fortnight beginning:

Thursday March 20th 2008 14.10

Hour Day Month Year

metal earth wood earth

xun ji yi mow

wei wei muw tze

sheep sheep rabbit rat

Month: yi muw The Wood Rabbit

Solar Fortnight: Chun fun Spring Equinox

Something Stupid

Just as it looks like the frosts are over and I’ve put three succulents outside in the SouthEast, there is a cold snap. For a day the snow even settles. Joey, my 12-year-old son declares a snowball war. I’d forgotten how frozen fingers sting.

“I’m gonna get you on the schnozz,” I threaten with my usual empty bravado. Needless to say he’s a pretty good shot and I’m white and drenched before we declare a truce and retire for hot soup.

I place three succulents because there are three Dragons in this family. The Dragon’s partner the Rat, rules the year and the Dragon itself rules the Spring as well as the South East. Three of course is a yang wood number relating to the East.

This type of procedure known as “placement” feng shui, probably thanks to Lillian Too the most popular form in the world, is frowned upon by Chinese Masters. But Chinese Masters are themselves a confused bunch: one genius whose teachings I have studied closely, insists that symbolic placement is meaningless unless it is gourdshaped. Go figure.

On the interactive ba zi workshop over the weekend I asked a very feisty lady whether she was a fan of America‘s Next Top Model. Her response was a violent instinctive recoil. As if she were that sort of girl. What I meant was of course that I am. And now I’m playing one of my favourite albums of all time, as I write. Is it Led Zeppelin IV? Cosi fan Tutti? Nope. Nancy Sinatra’s Greatest Hits. It’s got among other gems, the original version of Jacksonas made all their own by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Don’t tell the blokes.

Spirit and Destiny Review on the website.

Show me the Money

In my house the future water star is in the South East. This is what many would call the money spot. Not that it is all about money;. Commerce, progress, something like that probably renders it better. Traditional advice is to activate such a spot with gently moving yang water. Everything I do is based in traditional compass-style Imperial feng shui which concentrates on identifying the nature of the chi spots and using them appropriately. The flying stars show which places should be busy (or yang) and which should be quiet. If we get this right everything works.

This month I revisit Gina for whom I surveyed two years ago. She has questions about her daughter who won’t tidy her room. I spot both in the feng shui and her ba zi, that we are dealing with not so much a dispute with Gina’s daughter as with her mother.

In the intervening two years Gina has become a property magnate; she now owns a series of apartments. We placed water very precisely for her in 2006; believe me, it’s not always that straightforward. I warn her that most feng shui masters counsel the tycoon to stay liquid this year.

We can’t actually get in to her daughter’s room.

“So who is the obsessively tidy one?” I ask and she looks at me like I should be sectioned.

“Well it isn’t her, is it?”

“Hmmm. To be this untidy,” I say, having opened the bedroom door but now being unable to close it again. “Takes real determination.” Through the crack I can see a precarious pile of nasty-looking plates just out of reach. There are clothes all over the floor. Somewhere in the distance is a hamster cage; it looks worryingly still. I reach towards the plates.

I have the plates in my hand now. I think I may need a disinfectant wipe.

“Shall I bring them down?” I ask.

“She won’t,” says Gina.

Gina has a long-running grievance with her mother. She has never felt trusted. However discrete she has been, her children have grown up knowing this.

“They start out as your accomplices,” I tell her. “They learn that mothers are to be resented. Then at some point they resent you.”

We talk about what is to be done. Letting her mother off the hook seems the way forward. What hot shot feng shui plan have I got for her daughter’s room?

“Leave it just the way it is.”

“That’s not going to get it tidy.”

“You’d be amazed. Anyway she’s not going to die of untidiness.”

“That’s true.”

“On the other hand the hamsters might. “

“It smelt like that. Didn’t it?”

“And sooner or later she’s going to need clean knickers. Be there when she does.”

I have just finished a full survey of Monty’s beautiful flat in Kensington, having done a brief walkround some weeks ago.. His present water star is right at the front of his apartment, just where he sits to eat his pain au chocolat.

“Sit there,” I tell him. “Make your calls, do your plotting right here.”

He looks wistfully at his office at the far end of the apartment for which I have provided elaborate suggestions but the hot spot remains by the pain au chocolat. Should it have a water feature to stimulate it? For a variety of reasons, no. Sometimes the best thing you can do with a spot of perfect chi is to sit in it.

As well as placement there are other modern forms of feng shui. I was listening to a tape by a British teacher this week. His attention is centrally on the images and colours in a house and what they mean. A Master would have a fit. But it is hard to argue that sitting in say a red room is no different emotionally to sitting in a black one or that to wake up to a Klimt painting is likely to instil less optimism than a Mucha. But many Chinese masters in effect make just such claims.

Those of us who have done our homework know that the Yuen Hom or Xuan Kong flying stars were not derived by Jiang da Hong until the 18th century. Some Masters claim they are much older and they may be right – what Jiang seems to have come up with is a shorthand for the relationship between Hexagrams from the Book of Changes which of course had been in use fortwo millennia plus by his time. On the other hand the flying stars that have come down to us were only codified in the 1930’s by the populiser Shen Zhu Reng and his son Shen Di Wen.

If innovation by Chinese Masters as late as this is legitimate why not by Malaysians or Brazilians in the 21st century? The answer of course is the perennial need for people (especially men – or is that just me?) to be right. All of these ideas are derivations of the Tao or the Way which is inherently flexible – except when it isn’t.I am a longterm vegetarian and when I think I occupy the moral high ground, it’s time for a Big Mac. So when we think received ideas are absolute it’s time for a rethink. Isn’t this obvious?

Monty loves chrome and glass. He has queried my prescription ofsome brown accents several times now. Despite the pains au chocolat, he just doesn’t like brown.

West End Triumph

In the run up to another ba zi workshop. I give a talk to some ladies in the West End. I’m sorry I’ll type that again: the West End Centre in Esher. You can only plan these things up to a point but I find myself floundering all over the place. God, even I find myself tedious. It’s the night of the full moon, right on the Spring Equinox. So the energy is unsettled and heady. Or at least that’s my story.

Then one lady asks about her likely short term future. Then another, then another and the whole thing comes alive.

“What’s this year like for someone born in 1963?”

“Well you’re a lot more complex than this but 1963 is a Water Rabbit. Friends in high places. Prosperous but fluctuating. Rabbit and Rat have a relationship known as the Ingratitude Clash. So in a Rat year like this one, issues with parents or children relating to inheritance, will tend to arise and also your energy may come and go.”

Everybody is more than a Chinese Year animal, I explain. A ba zi identifies the animals relating to our month, day and hour of birth some of which can be more telling than the year. And human beings of course are individuals with free will.

One lady asks about her Pig child. Navigating away from the obvious jokes, I point out that there are two young Pigs at the moment: the water Pig of 1983 and the wood Pig of 1995. Oh and the brand new fire Pig of 2007.

“Pigs are versatile and wilful. Given too much freedom they can waste their abilities. But over-disciplined, they become robotic. To make it harder, the wood Pig can be trusted to know what’s good for him while the water Pig thinks he does but he doesn’t.”

“That doesn’t make it easy does it?”

“Forwarned is forearmed,” I say. “I know as the father of six children, that we don’t get dummies to practise on. Children are God’s way of keeping us anxious.”

“That’s handy.”

“Well and anxiety is God’s way of letting us know we’re not alone.”

“So the whole reception class this year will be the same animal?”

A couple of teachers nod. This is a bright group.

“It’s a while since I thought about infant school years but about 75% of children who are 5 years old in September of this year are water Sheep.”

“What are they like?”

“A little perverse.”

“Can you define a whole school year like that?”

“Allowing for what I said about people being complex, yes.”

This makes me pause for thought. It’s a while since I considered that idea.

“Any teacher will tell you a particular year has a particular identity,” I say.

“I’m a Dragon,” I tell them, “And Dragons suffer what is called the self clash. This means they don’t easily get on with each other. A Dragon-Dragon marriage, for instance, calls for a great deal of mutual giving of space. It just occurs to me that I haven’t seen a single one of my schoolfriends in decades and even when I was at school my friends were a year younger or a year older. That’s a great question.”

It’s the night of the full moon, right on the Spring Equinox as I said, and this apart from meaning that everyone goes bonkers all at once, means that Easter is as early as it ever gets. An early Easter can make for chaos organising children and holidays, you already know. You’d think they would be a bit more easygoing but over the years the Church has been pretty stubborn about it. Actually I understand that the Greek Orthodox Church always celebrate it in April. So if this year’s early Easter has made your life unmanageable, perhaps consider conversion or emigration.

But what interests me is that the date, as I said, like the Chinese New Year* is in line with the phases of the moon which raises a raft of other questions. Why would the church do that? I do have some answers which I will save for another time.Must be something in this mumbo-jumbo.

* The Chinese New Year falls on the 2nd New Moon after the Winter Solstice.

Easter is the 1st Sunday after the 1st Full Moon following the Spring Equinox.

Richard Ashworth © 2008

Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.

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