2012: The Water Dragon, the Year of Sudden Change. 

This is a long piece; for short simple predictions scroll to the end.

For predictions for individual Animals click here

“Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much…the wheel, New York, wars and so on…while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time…….the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man…for precisely the same reason.”

Douglas Adams.

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 Legless in Basra.

My earliest upbringing was in the village of Mullion, Cornwall in the remote South West of England, as far away from London as you can travel without getting wet; next stop Newfoundland. By the time I was four my mother had five children under seven, my father was often away at sea, there were no trains and a bus once a week, she didn’t drive and we were wild. I was climbing cliffs before I went to school and indeed before I could swim. So it was that as soon as I was literate I was reading pretty much anything I felt like without censorship or supervision. I knew Howard Carter, Leonard Woolley, HP Lovecraft, Lobsang Rampa and the Book of Changes before my voice broke. And Edgar Cayce.

Cayce (1877-1945) was a visionary and light worker who made a welter of predictions, many of which turned out to be false. One, as I recall was that the UK would be submerged by now, so that’s probably just as well. Global warming will lead to many changes but not that one. I intend to be able to be more specific by this time next year. I am myself a Water Dragon and working out what the 21^st century may hold is a great deal of what 2012 is about for me.

When a particularly cataclysmic prophecy proved wrong, Cayce would express relief that good will had pre-empted the visions becoming facts. Which is the quandary I find myself in every year at this time. I have to incorporate the clouds while holding out for the silver lining. We are each responsible for our reality and mine seems to include some nastiness. You know the type of thing: Darfur, Gaza, Tibet, The Human Centipede, News International, Tescos.

Every Dragon Year ushers in a phenomenon known as the Four Earths. This is perhaps the most powerful combination known to Chinese Metaphysics and it is the conjunction of Dragon, Dog, Ox and Sheep, the Earth Branches, sometimes called the Four Vaults or Tombs. Some very powerful (and conflicted) people find these in their ba zis. The Earth Animals are the connections to the Ancestors, to our heritage and they offer both opportunity and challenge. In a Dragon year of course such a conjunction is present in the Earth months of January (the Ox), July (the Sheep) and October (the Dog) especially on the days ruled by these Animals when the heavy duty opportunities emerge. Many Masters simply think of the Four Earths as misfortune but I have found them to signify moments that can make a life but which neglected, can lead to despair. They often coincide with a project that requires getting ducks into a row over a long period of time. Sometimes this takes a huge protracted effort and one duck can fall out of place. At that moment we may find illness or injury preferable.

Cayce’s view was that responsibility commits us to creating better if we know better. One of my most powerful influences, Dr. Chuck Spezzano whose model the Psychology of Vision pervades everything I do, appears to be wrestling with a vision of epidemics in just this way right now.

Among the better prospects for the future is the continued presence of the campsite in St Pauls Churchyard. I expect those kids are pretty cold at the moment, bless them. Those confronting the shameless tax dodgers of the dark canyons of the City and of Wall Street are as I have said before, predominantly drawn from the yang (that is the energetic) side of the compass: Rabbits, Dragons, Snakes, Horses, Sheep and Monkeys born between 1987 and 1992. Too young to vote on either side of the Atlantic in 2004 and 2005, they voted in 2008 and 2010 only to be deeply disappointed with the outcome. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it. No generation since the 60’s has been as prepared to take on injustice whether it’s the Inland Revenue for exempting bankers in return for a good lunch or shameless champion tax dodger Philip Green advising the Cameron government on waste. Whatever faecal heap my generation has bequeathed, there is hope while the next is holding Vodafone, Stagecoach and Arcadia to account.

Meanwhile across the North Atlantic in the direction of Newfoundland, my friend Rory Mackenzie is as I write, around a thousand miles short of the US coast. I met Rory in 2007 shortly after his leg had been blown off in Basra. Rory’s a medic. That’s a karma-free mission. He was not there to kill anybody. Now he and his multi-plegic comrades are rowing to the USA. Today they tell us their desalinator is malfunctioning which means they risk dying of thirst but it doesn’t seem to inhibit the banter. Rory reports that he has had to do imaginative things with (or without) underwear and lubricants. Ladies: look away now.

Imagine rowing four thousand miles. Now imagine doing it with one leg. Now imagine the pressure on the upper part of the missing limb. As his ba zi showed, Rory is impossibly brave. A sports-playing Action Man, when I met him he was so disconsolate he could hardly hold his head up. I told him however hard it gets, to trust. This too shall pass. It did and now with bottomless support from his family and especially his Mum Shealagh a heroine in her own right, he’s as fit as a man gets, limbed or limbless. There are few enough men who are prepared to feel and not to despair. Follow Rory on Twitter: @Row2Recovery .

I remain ambivalent about the whole Help for Heroes thing. I don’t want to encourage any more young men to be heroic for me. I don’t even buy a poppy for fear of being as Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance wrote, “another cog in the murder machine.” Somewhere in there I would end up endorsing the carve up in Iraq that Water Snake Tony Blair wished on Rory and his contemporaries. And more wars.

Rory was in Basra because the powers that be ignored a million-plus strong protest in 2003. We don’t er…need another hero. Someone described invading Iraq as like attacking Mexico in return for Pearl Harbour. What is to suggest they will take seriously a gaggle of kids shivering in the shadow of Goldman Sachs?

Nothing at all. But we must. I choose this despite what I know.

To pile on the agony the World Wide Fund for Nature says that as things are proceeding, there will be no trees or fish by 2050. They didn’t mention dolphins. What I know is that when investors can make more money solving global warming than by selling junk bonds short, the environmental crisis will be over. Since you asked, this will not be before 2016 but not later than 2043 which of course is a bit tight.

Climate is cyclical and the Earth has been this warm before. As a feng shui man, I work from the traditional Taoist axiom that history itself runs in cycles of sixty: there are twelve Chinese Year Animals (Rat, Dragon and so on) and five Elements (Wood, Water, Fire, Earth, Metal). Twelve Animals, five Elements, that makes sixty discreet years: Metal Tiger, Water Dragon, Wood Snake and fifty seven more. The central principle is that Dragons which appear every twelve years are alike, Water Dragons which come up once in sixty are very alike. They are, as you might expect wet; the Lynmouth flood for instance was sixty years ago in August 1952. Dragons are years of mud and landslides. That year also, the last Water Dragon, saw the opening of the Korean War and it would not take supernatural powers to foresee trouble in that pocket of the World in 2012. The fact that the prevailing energy of the year travels South East-North West making both of these sectors trouble spots, just underlines it. There’s a decent chance though that the outcome in the South East of South East Asia will be good news for the one of the most deprived populations in the world.

There are other informative ways of tagging the year: the magic square or lo shu (above) for 2012 holds the 6 at its centre, the Xuang Kong kua is 6/4 which suggests the annual concerns are Father-Daughter issues and the lap yum, Long Flowing Water usually describes protracted discussions.

These, Rory and his mates in their boat, the shivering kids in EC2 and snatches of dialogue from the Lord of the Rings are what inform these views of 2012. Hold on tight.

 “Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.”

Sam: “I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What are we holding on to, Sam?”

Sam: “That there’s still some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Better to be for things rather than against them. Exchanging Muslims for Russians or even Global Warming for Muslims doesn’t strike me as progress. The sooner none of us is against anyone else the better.

However, 2012 is a 6 year. Six is the number of Heaven and the Father, hence authority and getting things done and hence opposition. This is a year in which authority is challenged wherever it asserts itself. Also as the Rhyme of the Magpie goes, six is indeed the number of gold. A complex year but each of us – in so far as us means anything – is responsible for it. There may be a multiverse of possible realities but I’m right here.

I will be bringing the feng shui of each of my retainer clients into 2012 over the next few weeks but I can tell you now that when 6 is at the centre of the lo shu, there’s a buck to be made. And lost. My drill for 2012 outlines how to gain immediate benefit from the changed energy of the new year and will be available generally from early February but for now you might note that to profit from the Metal 6 you need to add Earth and Water. Ask me how.

Meanwhile it’s 2012 and we have a world to save. In a year when world leaders provided such an unhelpful example, what price the future? Cameron and Obama gain cheap approval points as 2011 ends with lazy postures of respectively knee-jerk opposition to the garlic eating, cheese making French peace monkeys and compliance with the insane family values of the Tea Party. But there is hope here. Obama’s one of the 1961 Metal Oxen who reassert their authority to a great extent in 2012. A re-elected Obama, free of the need to seduce voters may act as boldly as he talked in 2008. And pleasing the xenophobic wing of the Tory party is not going to gain Cameron’s uneasy coalition shelf life. I give it eighteen months, about as long as the Euro.

Because a Water Dragon is essentially Earth with added Water, wealth will be attaching to activities such as publishing, health and horticulture which can be labelled Wood and that thrive on Earth. Also favoured are Earth activities like building, property and spiritual endeavour that profit from Water, particularly towards the end of the year.

But don’t expect property values to recover. There is a whole new paradigm coming. I doubt that the notion of home as investment will survive the decade; 2012 is not the end of the world but it may be the year Marx gets proven right: when those who make the money do not pay the taxes, the majority tire of the rule of markets. If for “dolphins” we read Greece, Italy, Portugal and even France and for “humans” read Germany, it becomes clear why the Euro has such a short life expectancy. The b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar is probably not about 2012 but 2013, focusing as it does on December 21^st 2012, dung gee, the midwinter solstice which for many of us is the moment that indicates the character of the following year.

In any Dragon year change is rapid; not so great for Dragons like Philip Green who suffer the so-called self clash which means they tend not to play nicely among themselves. Nor on the face of it, is it promising for Dogs who often react poorly to the Dragon. In pole position are Pigs, Monkeys, Roosters and Rats who can expect to be at the top of their game.

But to use this information slavishly is to miss its point. Monkeys can easily fail to take advantage of the ball on the penalty spot in 2012 by simply not kicking it. Similarly the smarter Dragons will treat the probable turbulence and competition of the Year of the Water Dragon as a cue to learn, grow and change. A Water Dragon myself, I plan a very differently shaped year: I will be travelling and researching for two books and a tv series scheduled for 2013 and be very discriminating as to the surveys and new clients I take on.

Above all we need to remember that each of us is much more precious and more individual than any astrological definition. We were in any case, each born under Four Animals one for each of the month, day and hour as well as the year of our birth. As the introduction to the Animal Fortunes* page on my website clarifies each of these applies to a different sphere of our life. So if we find our year Animal (relating to heritage, family and our public persona) poorly augured we may instead like to focus on our month Animal (work, resources, immediate family, friends, peers, colleagues) or day (our truest self, relationship, spirit, psyche) or even hour (future, children, creativity, expression). Being born on an Ox day, I can anticipate an interesting and satisfying year relationship wise, something that is pretty essential if I am to push the boat out professionally. This is a rational way to employ essentially irrational material.

*If your immediate personal future is your main concern, click now and move on, I should.

Arab Sprung.

Chinese numerology is living algebra; like the other eight integers, there are literally millions of levels of meaning to the year number six. The 6 belongs in the North West and to the Dog and Pig. In classical feng shui nothing gets started if the North West is missing. Many times I have had to place something in that area of a house (generally outside of course) to compensate before I can make lasting changes. Every home needs a Father.

So by extension, we can expect a watershed year in which the trends of the 21st Century may start to become solid. If we take these trends to be towards the liberations of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt we may perhaps take comfort, if towards the score-settling in Libya or the human ducks-in-a-barrel of Syria, not so much. As more dolphin nations are bailed out and more bankers paid bigger bonuses while more libraries and public toilets close (all of which is likely) the pressure for positive change will build. In the UK, expect further riots, probably in August and probably met with disproportionate force. In 2012 peaceful demonstration will tend to be wilfully confused with insurrection. Smaller banks may fail around the same time. Like several others (April and December most probably) August will be a wet month also.

In the USA, as the Presidential Election progresses, the fault lines between the Northern and Western states and the Southern and Eastern will become more and more clear. Intellectually, morally, politically and spiritually the US is two if not three or four nations. In 2012, this becomes stark. By 2030 it will be physical.

Authority and efficiency are interesting themes for a year in which elections are to be held in so many major nations. It should for instance come as good news to Vladimir Putin in Russia where election means “election.” In the USA the way forward is simple for Barack Obama whose best approval ratings followed the assassination of a suspected but unconvicted terrorist and his family. Expect Obama to achieve re-election simply because his opponent will be selected from a short list of the deluded, intellectually challenged and criminal, a line-up so obviously lacking a statesman that even the American electorate might notice.

The Water Dragon is, as I said, the year of the landslide: literal landslides in the North West and South East as well as metaphorical ones at the ballot box. Expect trouble leading to eventual reunification in Korea in the South East of South East Asia. But it will be a rocky and potentially explosive road. Some nations like some people, are so damaged that they see a lifeline as an opportunity to pull their rescuer into the water. What can men do against such reckless hate? Iran is on that troubled NW-SE vector also and is going to be asked to blink this year. In Mexico, the 14^th largest economy in the world and the largest Spanish speaking nation, one of the focus nations of the 21^st century, elections will be at best troubled.

A light that never goes out.

The Chinese character for the Dragon depicts a rain cloud about to burst. Dragon energy is pent up, uncontainable, even violent. It is the moment that the nagging high pressure before the storm becomes the storm itself.  This pressure – financial, social, political – has been building in a hundred locations during the Metal Rabbit of 2011. In Lhasa as on Wall Street, it feels like something has to give. There is if you like, a war going on between love and control. You could see the positive side of this in the protest camps in Boston and Oregon as well as St Paul’s Churchyard and in the scenes of joy in Tahrir Square in Cairo. But it’s a knife edge. The South holds the tricky 2 Star and the three curses of Place, Calamity and Robbery under the Water Dragon. Arab Spring II, This time it’s Personal looks like a very inferior sequel. The prognosis in Libya is delicate: replacing one murdering tyrant with several isn’t going to change much of anything. In Tibet, to the North West of China, so many monks have set fire to themselves that the (Chinese) police now carry fire extinguishers. This Fire is spreading. It brings enlightenment along with heat but we don’t need any more human candles.

While the principle is that the events of previous Water Dragons will be reflected, those who know only Western history will be expecting parallels that can be found in the predominantly Eurocentric sources of reference. As Grand Master Raymond Lo (whose own subtly perceptive predictions can be found at www.raymond-lo.com) bemoaned to me in Singapore earlier this year, Wikipedia is a relatively shallow source.

It does not for instance highlight the Water Dragon year 208 BCE when China was finally reunited by Qin Shi Huang Di after two decades of impossibly brutal civil war. Nor that Qin and his dynasty were gone within two years of this reunification. Nor does it point out that many Chinese did not consider the infant PRC complete until Tibet, lost since the mid-19^th century, had been regained in the Water Dragon year of 1952. All of these facts suggest some sort of Chinese comeuppance over the next three to four years and this likelihood is echoed in a dozen other portents. Revolutions are started by the hungry and while the Chinese middleclass are driving Mercedes, they will continue to toe the line. Sometime between now and 2016 however, the legacy of poor domestic lending and the illiquidity of the rest of the world will burst the Chinese bubble. The following may suggest the shape of this.

”Forever blowing bubbles.”

“H needed to provide a mechanism for funding government debt (but) he could not (by law) establish a bank. He therefore established what, on its face, was a trading company, though its main activity was in fact the funding of government debt.

The government and the company convinced the holders of millions of pounds of short-term government debt to exchange it with a new issue of stock in the company. In exchange, the government granted the company a perpetual annuity or a perpetual loan paying 6 percent. This guaranteed the new equity owners a steady stream of earnings to this new venture. The government thought it was in a win-win situation because it would fund the interest payment by placing a tariff.

Next the company proposed a scheme by which it would buy more than half the national debt again with new shares, and a promise to the government that the debt would be converted to a lower interest rate, 5% for ten years and 4% per year thereafter. The purpose of this conversion was similar to the old one: it would allow a conversion of high-interest but difficult-to-trade debt into low-interest, readily marketable debt. The price peaked in early August and the level of selling was such that the price started to fall drastically, triggering widespread bankruptcies amongst those who had bought on credit, and increasing selling, even short selling—selling borrowed shares in the hope of buying them back at a profit if the price falls.”

This is not (though it might be) an account of how Goldman Sachs suckered the EU into admitting Greece into the Eurozone. Nor does it concern the fall of Lehman Brothers or even that of Enron in the last Dragon year of 2000 though it describes the mechanism of both. You’d think, these bucket shops of manufactured fraud being ten years apart, something might have been learned. But no and the whirlwind is still to be reaped.

The year in focus is the Metal Rabbit of 1711 when the South Sea Trading Company was founded and the events illustrates perfectly the cyclical nature of time. During the Water Dragon year of 1712 and the subsequent decade, the company issued and traded a series of financial instruments, each more preposterous than the last until in 1720 it went down along with huge numbers of investors. This may well give us a clearer view of the meaning of the b’ak’tun as it suggests the likely pattern of the years 2011 to 2020. As we move into the next Chinese Fate Period -9- which relates to Fire and is likely to be dominated by global warming, we can expect six to seven years of financial crisis, paralleling those of 300 years ago.

Ronery no more.

The East is the place of hope in 2012 but India, the world’s largest democracy is a more likely industrial giant in the 21^st Century than China, the World’s biggest command economy. The South East holds the baleful 5 wu huang Star which implies avalanches and mudslides in the Spring and Autumn along the NW-SE path of the year energy: Oregon, China, Korea, Ulster. Good news for Norwich City and Moscow Dynamo but suggesting a meltdown at FIFA. Good for Poland, poor for Italy, good for Mexico not so great for Argentina. There may be East-West wrangles over intellectual property.

Richard Ashworth © 2012

Short & Simple:

Oscars: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Glenn Close, Viola Davis.

Euro 2012: England has a real chance.

Olympics: Disrupted and disappointing for England. Over policed.

Kate & William: happy announcement later in the year.

London Election: Livingstone despite surprise big guns behind Boris

Paul McCartney: dispute over intellectual property.

Iran: all down to Netanyahu.

Weather: prodigiously wet.

CERN: unexpected evidence of multiverse.

Cricket: England to beat South Africa despite intrusive political issues.

Facebook: extends reach, capital value increases massively.

Robert Mugabe slept in my bed.

1. I’ve got a gong and I’m not afraid to use it.

My friend Dawn is a self-made not-so secret millionaire. She made her fortune in the flooring business. At pretty much every modern international airport you’ll find yourself stepping on her floors. And she’s been a pioneer in introducing non-toxic solvents and in fair treatment of the workforce too. Altogether she’s a remarkable woman. And she’s bonkers about feng shui though I’m sometimes not sure she’s quite sure what she means by that.

Last time I visited her big homestead high on the Cheshire ridge, she had just placed a pond. My compass said it was in the North East.

“Why now, why there?” I ask her. I know she expects me to scold her when she does these things. Why buy a dog and do your own barking?

“I just sort of thought it would be nice,” she says innocently.

She has of course placed the pond intuitively. Intuitively. What do we mean by this? Most Chinese Masters are dismissive of students who claim to be intuitive because it’s so often an excuse for not doing the homework. As it happens, all the great ones are deeply intuitive but don’t try getting them to own up.

I do some calculation. Dawn plays new age music that keeps hinting at tunes and then stopping short. It’s poignant and atmospheric. Once or twice I zone out and listen to Bon Iver’s achingly beautiful version of Bonnie Rae’s I can’t make you love me. If she wants my attention Dawn has a big Balinese gong she can hit from time to time.

Technically I’m identifying what palaces Dawn has put the doors into by placing water. The palaces are like a clock face. There are twelve of them, ranging from birth to death via maturity. Each occupies a position on the compass depending on the source the energy is coming from. And a massive external body of water will usually be that source. In other words the pond has altered the nature of the energy entering the house.

“Well?” she asks, bringing me a cup of tea just the way I like it; English Breakfast, strong, too much milk, builder’s tea, this is the North of England, after all.

“You’ve put your front door into mo yuk.”

“What does that actually mean? You know I can’t tell a ying tong from a ping pong.”

“Mo yuk means hanky panky. You’ll have been unusually frisky.”

She colours and tells me just how right I am. And her secrets are of course safe with me. Suffice it to say that she’s a recently divorced woman who has every right to a bit of fun.

She tells me she’s concerned that money is flowing only one way right now: out.

“Will that have anything to do with the pond?”

I look out across the vales of Cheshire where the disc of Jodrell Bank is shining in the distance. Her house is high up the slope and the long drive falls away to the West.

“The West is where money is this year.”

“OMG. Did I do that?”

“You’ll have made it more extreme. Next time I’ll balance it up.”

“How?”

“Height and weight. The West is best kept high and heavy long term. This year, if it’s not, it’s likely to mean money going out. You’ll need something very heavy.”

“I’ve been thinking of a stone circle,” she says and stares into the middle distance. I have seen that look before.

2. The ground beneath my feet.

On my way back from Singapore at Changi Airport, a month later I notice the particularly springy flooring and text Dawn.

“This one of yours?”

“Yep.”

In Singapore and Malaysia I have noticed so much building, so much busyness, so much commerce that Blighty seems very tame by comparison. It’s twenty degrees cooler back home in every sense I can think of. Singapore and Malaysia. are feng shui central of course. Nothing is built without involving the legions of feng shui men. You have only to raise your eyes to the skyline. At the junction of North Bridge Street and Pickering Street I see skyscrapers with missing corners, skyscrapers with holes cut out of them and skyscrapers in a sort of static Mexican stand-off where a very tall one is topped by another slightly taller one and this by another in a constant game of architectural top-handie.

Because Singapore is eight hours ahead, I’ve found myself working almost round the clock. By day I’m looking at buildings and researching, by evening handling emails and calls from England. I do a lot of my work in Starbucks because they’re the same wherever you go and I like to work surrounded by energy without having to get too deeply involved. For those studying ba zi btw, this gives away that I was born in the Monkey month.

One afternoon, for some variety I walk to the colonial Raffles Hotel, now dwarfed by its surroundings. Nearby there’s an extreme example of feng shui one-upmanship: a restaurant complex mirrors St Andrews’ Cathedral opposite with its tall spires. The surrounding high rises echo both but they’re so much bigger. Their towers dwarf the colonial markers that once established the supremacy of the British way of life. Not any more.

And there is no recession here. Everyone’s in business. The Metro teems and there are cranes all over. Everywhere there is building, everywhere competition. A generation ago Singapore had fishing villages and open space. It’s only about the size of the Isle of Wight and yet it competes on equal terms with vast nations like China, Germany and the USA. But it’s just about run out of space.

It’s monsoon season, very hot and uncomfortably humid which makes it a relief after Raffles to enter the air conditioned malls again. Monsoon season means storms every afternoon, some of them spectacular electrical spectacles. It also means that the pavements are slick from about 4pm. In Singapore much of the pavement is shiny terracotta and I’m wearing rather natty red Converse All Stars which have virtually no grip. Cue feng shui man in the frozen lake scene from “Bambi”.

3. Strait Story

I take the bus North into Malaysia. It’s a high tech double decker which gives me a wonderful view across the Straits of Malacca. Any ship sailing East-West whether Royal Navy aircraft carrier on the way back via the Red Sea to the Mediterranean or Fuchuan warship of the fleet of Admiral Zheng He en route to Malindi on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, has had to pass through here since navigation began. The coach eats the miles and I eat a cold curry served by the young Muslim steward.

Although Singapore and Malaysia are very different, they share this constant hum of building. Only Malaysia has more real estate. There’s no hardwood any more but there are at least real mountains to the North and open space.

Jim and Tessa’s condo in Kuala Lumpur is typical. It’s so new that the load bearing columns are too full of wires and technology to afford me an accurate take on my compass. The needle goes haywire and I have to stand back yards. I conclude it’s East-West though.

Tessa is a sweet lady with roots in half-a-dozen cultures. Malaysian is one, Welsh is another. Their last home was in the valleys outside Cardiff. This is a bit different.

Tessa is also a big fan of feng shui. For her though it is a Chinese thing with strict rules and traditions. She loves to pore over the almanacs produced by every Master in South East Asia with a following and her shelves are stacked with technical books on feng shui, ba zi and other aspects of Chinese metaphysics. She plies me with tea and sandwiches and tasty Malaysian delicacies. My being a vegetarian doesn’t faze her at all. Her ba zi suggests next year she takes her cooking skills seriously.

I show them both on the development plan how the guard house is appropriately to the North West and the external water of which there is a great deal – fountains, swimming and infinity pools – North and that there’s an alternative exit South West and a substantial shrine to the East. When Jim takes me out past the armed guards to measure up, I see that the shrine is loaded with recent offerings: fruit, joss sticks, tealights. The Buddha is as golden as a koi carp.

I explain that these positions spell a dwelling deliberately positioned in Wood chi formation. Furthermore there’s a chunk left out of the floor plan, making for a classic “hatchet” shape which is I imagine to stimulate trading of the apartments.

Tessa’s mostly concerned that the condo is safe for 2012.

“Where can I put my candles this year?” she asks, house proud and concerned about cooking smells.

I generally treat a condo as a room in a bigger building. Theirs is in the West of the development which means they are sitting both on the wealthy Water star and the healthy Mountain star. So that’s alright then.

Jim good-naturedly shows me round. They banter. Tessa pretends he’s totally useless and he pretends not to be a man who commands silly fees for repairing the IT systems of big corporations. He’s on the cusp of a decision: is the future of his business East or West? In 2012, the Year of Sudden Change, both East and West are prosperous. The long term is East though.

The kitchen is in the South East which is ideal in 2012 when the nasty wu huang 5 star will arrive. A kitchen activates so much contradictory energy – Wood in the form of food, the Fire of cooking, the Metal of cutlery, the Earth of simply eating and of course a great deal of Water – that it is the perfect place to hide poor flying stars.

Jim and Tessa have put me up in the very smart East Inn Hotel. They buy me dinner there the first night. Tessa flirts outrageously with the very French head chef who I take at first to be gay. He’s not and he’s a rather interesting man whose cv includes a two month spell as a human shield hostage in Iraq. He also makes a world class Thai red curry.

In the bar a pretty Muslim girl is fronting a covers band; voices, guitar, backing tracks. She of course knows and loves Tessa. She sings “Light Up” with great sensitivity and afterwards I congratulate her on “that Snow Patrol song”.

“Snow Patrol?” she questions. We settle for Leona Lewis.

Tessa buys an ornate water feature from the feng shui shop. I think it’s mostly to terrorise the nervous Chinese guy who owns it. She haggles without mercy. Jim and I hang back, neither of us brought up for this.

I set their condo up for 2012. There are fresh places to stimulate for wealth and safety in the Water Dragon year. And I get a first hand look at the new condo they’re buying across town. I’ve only seen it on paper before. Once again I can see that there is feng shui intelligence at work in the orientation, the way the blocks are positioned relative to the river and the two promontories have been kept West and North East relative to the buildings. It’s so clear, it’s as if I know the thinking of the Masters responsible. Which may actually be the case.

Jim takes my picture: feng shui man sweltering in front of apartment block.

Before they found their temporary accommodation, Jim and Tessa stayed at the number one hotel in KL for several months.

“Wonderful hotel, the best suite,” Tessa says with a twinkle. “You’ll never guess who had slept in my bed.”

“Try me.”

“Robert Mugabe.”

“Robert Mugabe slept in your bed,” I repeat back to her.

“Robert Mugabe slept in my bed.”

Jim is falling about laughing.

“I’m not a bit surprised,” I say.

3. Hanky, no panky.

Back in Cheshire, Dawn has ordered two trucks of huge stones.

“You’d better tell me where to put them,” she texts me.

Indeed I had.

From my Chinese calendar I choose a very special day. She meets me at the railway station in her coupe with a purple Dragon stencilled on the bonnet. It has state-of-the-art mp3 hi fi that only plays U2.

Next morning I’m up early. I’ve calculated positions for the stones that will balance the house. When you calculate where to put Mountain (that is height and weight) and Water (that is er… water) in a Xuan Kong pattern there are two main considerations: what suits the house and what suits the person. Often these contradict and usually they require compromise. Remarkably the locations are pretty much precisely those that I would have chosen if I were calculating something specially to suit her which isn’t how I arrived at them. There are huge odds against this fortunate occurrence. No such thing as coincidence.

In my faux Paul Smith coat I venture warily into the freezing morning to locate the sites in the landscape. Dawn’s excitable about the ley lines her dowsing rods have unearthed running across her garden. She’s always excitable actually. Paul Smith doesn’t keep the chill out and she lends me something more Arctic, a fetching little blue number. But still my thumbs are so cold it’s hard even to rotate the rings of my luopan.

Affable Northern workmen are already outside with anglegrinders and mallets and drills. My meticulously calculated Xuang Kong positions fall almost precisely into her ley lines. This is pretty interesting too. This woman is certainly a Master of something.

The stones arrive, huge irregular shapes of local sandstone. The guy who delivers the first consignment explains to me that the hoist on his truck can take precise volumes of weight out a certain distance from the flatbed. The hoist lifts first one stone then another into position. The low winter sun emerges dazzlingly from behind the trees above Dawn’s home. He manoeuvres the last stone into precisely the correct location. It’s bloody cold. Dawn makes tea. One of those moments of perfect poignance.

It’s been a very special day. Dawn tells me that today she has been able to dowse without her rods.

“Dowsing rods are just an excuse not to take responsibility,” I say.

“I know, I know,” she says. “Those stones look bloody good though, don’t they?”

Richard’s website is: www.imperialfengshui.info

Water Palaver

Singapore. Friday 17th November.

Just a few weeks until the Water Dragon of 2012. The Dragon is the Thunder, the beast of sudden change. Events build to a peak and then the Dragon brings the chaos that resolves.

It wouldn’t take a diviner to see that next year is unlikely to be tranquil. In St Paul’s Churchyard there’s a kind of invisible, silent battle going on. I can feel it all the way from here. It would be crass to call it good versus evil and all conflict is illusion but there’s something of that about it. Love against control perhaps. Those kids are waiting for something. And something’s starting to happen.

But I’m 12000 miles away. Burl Ives singing Holly Jolly Christmas?  30 centigrade plus humidity?  This must be Singapore in November.  Every time I come here it’s bigger; more buildings and more tourist attractions to compensate for the buildings. It’s a vibrant 24 hour place but there’s no Earth anymore, everywhere fresh construction, more land reclaimed from the sea for more skyscrapers. There’s hardly a building under ten storeys. And then there’s Sentosa Island.
I’m going out to Sentosa to attend a conference of Feng Shui Masters so I can corner one who is the cutting edge on date selection and isn’t returning my emails.

Before I leave I have a flurry of stuff to deal with.

On the morning I fly, I clear a young boy’s bedroom. He has ME. We pull the bed to the middle of his room, dust, scrub and Hoover the perimeter, then replace the bed and attend to the middle. Then his Mum and I place tourmaline tumble stones on the floor all around the walls; one every few inches. They are to be removed on -you guessed it- the next Remove Day which is approximately (but not always exactly) twelve days away.

I was originally called in because his Mum had placed an ornate water garden in a position that had made most of her doors wrong (don’t ask) and inadvertently frustrated their joint plan to have her husband forsake the hurly burly of corporate Olympus to be home with her. She didn’t know that was why she was calling me in, just that something was wrong.
The little boy – in truth just about a teenager – has been home from school too long. One of the teachers told his Mum that it was all in his head. That of course would not make it any less real.

Before that Jackie calls me back to her very large house. She’s trying to sell it. Miraculously a purchaser appeared just as I was surveying. These things happen; sometimes the act of calling (that is emailing) the feng shui man starts the energy moving. However, she can’t make the major changes required because the sale is “as seen”. You can’t go removing waterfalls between offer and completion even if they’re in Imperial Heaven Star bou din which is an absolute no-no for water. It’s in the South West btw which is where many authorities say you can fill your boots. Don’t believe a word. Water in bou din: the mother sheds tears.

Junk

It’s very warm here but mostly it’s humid. I’m sweaty within minutes of stepping out into the street. Which is probably more than you needed to know. As is that I was dripping by the time I even got to my room but that might be consequent upon the fact that I’m on the third floor and there’s no lift. This is the first time I’ve stayed in Chinatown. It’s still crowded and funky. And unlike the rest of Singapore it’s mostly narrow streets and the buildings are reassuringly small. There’s a night market across the way full of the sort of tat I know Sheila would love. She should be here. Next time.

I take the MTR (Metro) to Harbour Front. Sentosa Island rises out of the sea, reclaimed and extended like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island complete with 50 metre tall Merlion. A beautiful little Chinese girl points and says “Lion” to her mother with impossible cuteness.

Singapore is business, business, business and this is play, play, play. Now the bays and coves and villages are gone, to make up for it,  they need casinos, Formula One, theme parks, a big wheel a few metres taller than the London Eye. And Sentosa Island.

You can approach Sentosa by funicular or monorail. So I walk. There’s noise, tourists and food everywhere, rides, restaurants, a huge Casino and a colossal marina. And clutching at straws, the powers that be are attempting to capitalise on the fact that the Admiral Zhong He (of 1421 fame) lay his fleet over by the island at the opening  of his epic voyage. There’s a partial reconstruction of his flagship in a brand new Maritime Experience Museum full of souvenir shops, between Crockfords’ Casino and Universal Studios.

Before Jackie, I went to see a lady in Hampshire who wants help selling her house after three years on the market. It’s a long story -family- but I can’t see any reason she’d want to sell. My friend Master Howard Choy says that feng shui follows “ching” that is to say affection. For feng shui to work, he says, someone’s got to care. If I were her, I wouldn’t. Nuff said.
Before that I’m in Brighton, my favourite destination on Earth because it allows me to see my daughter Henni who’s at Sussex University. My clients are a couple with serious family difficulties going back generations. We talk ba zi for a very long time then I measure and move around the house. I find her father – if you subscribe to that metaphor -somewhere in the North West where he ought to be and talk with him. His own father drowned saving him. That’s complex stuff. He like anybody else, just needs love. So we give him some.

Night Falls

The assembled campers at St Pauls, mostly born between 1987 and 1992, the yang half of the great year, Rabbit to Monkey,  appear to have been drawn to the City, the Shard, the Heron Building and One, Canada Square. These tall buildings are the t’ang lungs, the hungry wolves of London. The theory is that t’ang lungs bring prosperity and power to those within and those positioned correctly in relation to them. Who would argue it doesn’t work?

It’s now 8pm and my body thinks it’s noon. That’s following the one and a half hour’s sleep I enjoyed last night. I’ve spent another day listening to feng shui Masters telling me feng shui is scientific; that’s before, after and during a visit to the Nirvana Memorial Gardens. There is no linear theory that is ever going to explain how placing your ashes in an auspiciously numbered red and gold  casket surrounded by glowing Buddhas is going to enhance your children’s inheritance. And that’s not to say that that doesn’t work either.

I have scrambled egg, tomatoes, bean sprouts and rice for dinner in the unpretentious cafe next door to the hotel. It’s just perfect and the lady of a certain age who serves me has a lovely smile. And my head is zinging.
I get a conversation with the Master I seek. He puts across ideas that are a million miles from scientific. That’s a relief.  We arrange to meet in 2012

The kids at St Paul’s and Boston and Oakland and Wall Street are the ones who were disenfranchised in 2004/5 on both sides of the Atlantic and then mostly sold down the river by 2010.  Something’s changing as riot police pepper spray peaceful students in California and  bankers float £20 notes from upper storey windows in Leadenhall Street down on students good-humouredly protesting at funding cuts. East or West, arrogance is the traditional response of doomed power.

Many don’t know quite why they are in the cathedral churchyard but have been drawn by a sense of wrong and of the coming Dragon. I see them in my dreams, in Boston and Oakland and on Wall Street too. It reminds me of some other great gathering that I can only half remember.

Those who are on the side of the angels are watching closely and so are those who are not, while the battle stays silent and invisible for the time being. There’s something world changing going on here and the trigger event has yet to take place. The Euro and the banks will last to 2012 but not to 2014, I think. That’s one of the things these kids do know.

Washington Emolument

In 2005 in the company of Master Howard Choy, I visited the sacred Taoist complex at Wudan Shang set among the “Seventy Two Mountains” in Hubei, Central China. The breath taking photograph of the green roofs against the azure blue of the sky that adorns the cover of my book the Feng Shui Diaries was taken by feng shui architect Carlo Reyneri that day. Feng Shui carries no essential spiritual baggage but that was an extraordinary day, the sort that stays with us for life. That year we also visited Prince Zhao’s mausoleum where the river has been dried up by the Three Gorges Project as well as Mao Tse Tung’s birthplace in Xiaoshan just outside Changsha, the most tense place on Earth and high above the village at the head of the valley, the tomb of Mao’s grandfather.

Howard tells me he is planning to lead another trip to China in October 2012. I strongly recommend you go. Click here for more info.

Mountains come in a variety of patterns; nine basic and infinite variations and each means something. Morecambe Bay, home of my teacher Master (soon to be Grand Master) Derek Walters is lined with goy moons – the huge gate, Wudan Shang largely with mou kuk (guardian) and t’ang lung –  the hungry wolf. I could never make the count seventy- two by the way: sixty-eight, seventy four, sixty-seven? 2011 is the time of the hungry wolf, I think. The kids outside St Pauls Cathedral, in Boston, New York and Seattle recognise this. This is the generation born between 1987 and 1994, that on both sides of the Atlantic, was disenfranchised in 2005 and bitterly disappointed when they got finally to vote in 2008 and 2010 respectively. This generation, the yang (that is outgoing) Animals from Rabbit to Monkey will not take unfairness lying down. The t’ang lungs of Wall Street and the Square Mile draw them like iron filings to a magnet.

The t’ang lung is an upright, trunk-like shape, used in some schools of feng shui as an attractor of wealth and power. The ideal is to find it naturally in the form of hills but it is often synthesised. The bigger and older it is, the more energy a made up one will hold. Examples include Cleopatra’s Needle which was plundered from Egypt in the 19th century (but since the early 19th century has been on the London Embankment) and its twin at the foot of the Champs Elysées.

Interestingly this year the Washington Monument, the World’s best known t’ang lung, has been closed for structural reasons. Those of a conspiratorial turn of mind* consider that the Monument was part of an 18th century Masonic plan to carry the British Empire across the Atlantic. I don’t have time for conspiracy theory but if it was, it does seem to have worked. And I’ve listened to more than one Chinese Master explain exactly what part t’ang lungs might have played. Notice there are one or two in Beijing. It’s also interesting to record that the plot was chosen and the monument designed sixty or so years before it was erected. As if someone was awaiting the perfect moment after the Civil War had been won, the Suez Canal had been cut and the new Fate Cycle begun in 1863.

Similar questions could be asked about the tomb of Mao Tse Tung’s grandfather. How did a penniless peasant get to be buried in pole position? How did those who placed him there six years after his death get the formula so wrong so that instead of three generations of power, he managed just the one? What other puzzles are hidden in the Chinese landscape? If you join Howard Choy’s expedition, you might find out for yourself. He’s a native Mandarin speaker as well as a tai chi, chi gung and feng shui Master, raconteur and good sport. You could not be in safer or more skilled hands.

*See, for instance, David  Ovason, “The Washington Zodiac

Chop Suey
It’s often said that travel broadens the mind. If you haven’t been to Paris, for instance, you won’t know how fit you have to be to climb to Sacre Coeur. Venice may appear a quaint seaside resort until you realise that it’s not so much by the sea as in it. Similarly unless you have visited New York it may not have occurred to you that Wall Street is a canyon of drafts and shadows where it can be chilly even on the brightest day. Since 9/11  there have been two shadows fewer.
Well before that, more than one feng shui Master identified what is known as “Heaven Chop” between the Twin Towers. Heaven Chop is where two buildings are too close together relative to their height. Traditionally no good follows this. Which of course is not that handy to know ten years after the fact; it is however a matter of record, that in July of 2001, Thai Master Mas Kehardtam at least, advised a client to move out because he saw impending danger.
Every year, about this time, while I am compiling my own forecast for the coming year, I check in with a number of Chinese Masters. Some of them have been doing this for decades and routinely pick impending events accurately. GrandMasters Raymond Lo and Tan Khoon Yong fixed on August 7th 2008 for financial meltdown, for instance way ahead of the event. I haven’t done too bad myself but you’d have to look at my archives to confirm that and native Chinese Masters are of course, unlike me, born with this in their blood. Anyway the fact is that we’re all working from the same raw information and each drawing our own conclusions.

Joey Yap 2012

One such Master is the boy wonder Joey Yap who this year for the third time, comes to London to offer his own hostage to fortune. He is offering his prognosis for 2012 to the public on Saturday October 15^th and I can’t recommend him enough. He will amuse and educate you as well as offering an edge for 2012. As well as this, he’s also teaching feng shui and ba zi over the two days following this. I don’t think anyone else apart from me (see below) is offering freestanding authentic ba zi instruction in the UK and our teachings though different, are complimentary.
All his material is worth a look. To book, download this registration form or follow the link on my website.
Stop Press: City safe
A note of reassurance: the City of London unlike Wall Street, runs North-South and so is not dark 20 hours out of 24. It is built on the Roman grid between London Wall and the Thames, both of which are East-West. The disasters that threaten in accordance with the principles of feng shui, are therefore different. Only those buildings that are North of the new skyscrapers are affected by serious  light loss. On the other hand it is clear that banking has become a shadowy business and each new one makes for just a little more shadow.
I will be at Joey Yap’s Predictions on the 15th. Hope to see you there.

Brief Bulletin

Clearing banks

It’s normal in South East Asia for a feng shui man to oversee any major building project. Everyone in Singapore knew that the late Master Swan Lek supervised the building of the eccentrically placed Casino and that Grand Master Tan Khoon Yong succeeded him. It’s also common knowledge that the architect Richard Rodgers incorporated feng shui into the design of buildings in Hong Kong. Even I once impressed clients buying a condominium in Kuala Lumpur by identifying the style of the feng shui of the development and from that telling them correctly which apartment would have been handpicked for the architect to occupy. That’s the Far East of course; they do things differently there.

There is however no question but that some of the biggest organisations in the world are using feng shui on a grand scale. And not just in the Far East but here in London. You only have a to look at the shape and position of certain buildings like the MI6 building or Swiss Re (known of course as “the Gherkin”) to be sure.

Usually they’re secretive about it. It’s relatively unusual for blatant feng shui to take as high a profile as the current HSBC advertising campaign: the one in the Sundays. With the stack of books.

HSBC may have its HQ in the square mile but its roots of course are in Shanghai and it shares house colours with the Bank of China: red on white. This is the red of Fire melting the white of Metal into liquid capital. Which may sound contrived but only one British clearing bank has required no shoring up; this one. The feng shui seems to be working.

An example of a bank that seems to have ignored feng shui altogether is the Union Bank of Switzerland, current record holder (at £2+ billion) of the biggest fraudulent trading bill in history, whose City HQ is drastically undermined. Go and have a look. I’ve looked at the void under that building close up and it was always asking for trouble.

The HSBC ad features the usual red and white and the Dragon emblem (meaning power) plus fortuitous « 8»s and «g»s as well as a kind of staircase of books apparently bound in green leather. There are twelve books just as there are twelve Animals (the staircase leading into 2012, I guess). The Wood colour green is an innovation, presumably to represent this Rabbit year and each volume is marked with a Roman numeral from I to XII which for many masters is shorthand for the Twelve Animals, I being Rat, XII Pig and so on.

Is this coincidence? If it is, so are the infinity symbols and interest rates featuring 8’s.

Human rights and the environment are another issue the Chinese being the pragmatic people they are, but one of the thousand Chinese Masters I’ve never met, is orchestrating this feng shui and it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to.

Thought you’d like to know.

Richard Ashworth.

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diary

for the month of the Wood Horse

Monday June 6^th 2011 09.43

“Do you think feng shui can have a knock on effect? Just wondered as the trainer in the yard is having lots of winners and so are our neighbours.”

Judy, Berkshire.

 Discover the Secrets of the Four Pillars of Destiny

 Deep in the Heart of Texas

A policy of aggression leads only to vengeance. Kung FuTse (Confucius) Analects.

It’s been twenty years since I last visited Texas and even that was really only a stopover. Before that it was in the summer of 1963 that I drove with my family across the panhandle en route to California. Later that summer I surfed at Hawthorn Beach, possibly sharing the same waves as the Beach Boys – well the thin ones who surfed anyway. I was ten. It rained on us in the Mojave Desert, the driest place on Earth; which is around as common as a heatwave in the Arctic Circle. That’s a long time ago and I have spent no further time in Texas since.

The first thing you notice about Texas is that it is so Spanish. And Hispanic people are not an underclass. They were here first and everyone speaks Spanish. Otherwise there’s not that much ethnic variation; someone joked – Kinky Friedman ? – that it’s illegal to be Jewish here.

The second thing you notice is that Texas is so big. Gothenburg, the town I’ll be working in is, in terms of amenities and people, the size of a small market town but it’s miles long and the main street is a four-lane highway. There’s no question of walking. Transport is by four-by-four.

I’m heading for the Texas hill country where I’ll be helping Dale with the house she is building on a thirty-acre plot. The last time she self-built her then-husband left. Understandably she’s been fussing over a series of draft plans for a year or so. What’s needed is that she gets started. She’s a Wood Sheep, the Animal that contains best the sort of extended family in which there are no formal names for the relationships, but she’s kind of attached to husband number two and we don’t want any more of that, do we?

Next Year: Jackson

They say that travel broadens the mind. What’s certainly true is that extreme views are born of ignorance. The British National Party can only talk about England for the English because they don’t know any history, Hitler failed all his senior exams except Art and PT. I like to know where I am and to do that you have to listen.

As the plane taxis after landing I have Anchorage by Texas songwriter Michele Shocked on my i-pod when the pilot asks the passengers in a quietly urgent voice to stay in their seats. Two police – a woman and a man – enter the plane.

“Is Daniel Feinberg on this aircraft?” the male officer calls out.

A hand goes up behind me at a window seat. The police walk briskly in that direction. The officer asks the couple in the aisle and middle seats to make their way to the front of the plane. His voice is efficient rather than threatening but it’s a tone you don’t argue with. Feinberg edges across to the aisle.

“Sir, are you Daniel Feinberg?”

The man nods.

“Then I’m arresting you,” he replies turning Feinberg around and putting cuffs on him.

Oh my God, Kinky Friedman was right.

Anchorage, although of course named after the capital of Alaska, the only state bigger than Texas, takes the form of a letter from Michele Shocked’s long lost best friend who now has a “six month old baby girl.” She recalls when “we was wild” and suddenly realises they have both become adult.

“Chel, I think I’m a housewife.”

Perfect lyrical violin solo, wonderful production by Pete Anderson.

Texas is of course in the extreme South of the United States and to the South of Texas is Mexico which is the direction we expect trouble in 2011, the South being where the irritating 7 Flying Star of interference and attack, sits this year. Mexico bears something of the geographical relationship to the USA that North Africa does to Europe; the Arab Spring still looks hopeful, the War on Drugs hangs in the balance. In Northern Mexico 35,000 people have died violently so far this year and it’s only June.

Texas, as Michele sings, is so big.

In the luggage retrieval there’s a guy with an Osama sleeps with the fishes  t-shirt and there are lots of patriotic signs welcoming troops back to San Antonio.

Full of Beans

Next morning I am at breakfast with Dale and her husband Sam, who invites me to order whatever I want. Sam and his buddy George are like all the men in the coffee shop, wearing denim, boots and stetsons. This is cowboy country.

“Baked beans on toast, please” I tell the waitress. But it turns out they only have pinto beans which are not the same thing at all.

“Another icon blown,” I say. “There were baked beans on the campfire in The Searchers, The Commancheros, She wore a Yellow Ribbon….. I suppose you’re going to tell me all John Wayne’s films were just fiction.”

Dale nods.

“Even The Alamo?”

“Especially the Alamo.”

“Noooo,”

Sam and George are deeply concerned about the Drug Wars. The murdered include government officials, police and journalists.

George approves of the shooting of journalists. He’s a bit confused. He thinks the reports about the elimination of Osama Bin laden were unpatriotic.

“Yu git um and yu git the hell out. Ain’t nobody’s business how yu done it. Everbody knows why.”

I’m kind of shocked but then he talks affectionately about his children and I remember he’s human. I dont know what Animal George is but Sam is a Pig which of course makes him a pretty good fit with Dale.

The Deer Hunter

We find the plot. There are perhaps twenty dwellings in a two hundred acre development. Dale tells me how one is a weekend home and that one has been empty for some while and this other has hardly been used. There are no fences.

“This is about containment,” I say. Dale frowns.

We arrive at their plot. It’s several minutes walk from edge to edge; scrub, brush and native oaks. To one limit there is what you and I might call a lake but they refer to as “the pond”. Texas is, as I say, big.

I’m with Dale by the flimsy fence that marks the extent of their property. There is a queue of deer jumping the fence one by one.

“It’s about containment,” I repeat. For the most part this job is not about anything more than constructing a home that people are happy to stay in. “It couldn’t be more clear if they were giving us the finger.” Not of course that cloven hooves lend themselves to such gestures of defiance.

Her plan is for a substantial one-level home that mirrors the traditional homes of the Northern Germany their ancestors hail from. I’m no architectural historian but I remember these types of house from a trip through Westphalia in 2001.

I like a house to be slightly but not too far off the centre of the plot. Feng shui tends to favour near rather than actual symmetry. That’s why the Foo Dogs that mark the entrance to Taoist temples come in unmatched pairs: yin and yang, one with the pup and the other with the football, as my friend Master Howard Choy has it.

Here, the flood plain which Dale has laid out on a chart for me, dictates a small area where the building will fit. In any case we want the safety of height behind and open space in front and the slope which discourages the flood, will permit only a limited choice of facing directions. All this I know already from the dvds Dale has been emailing me since we started talking late last year and I have already prescribed an orientation.

What I couldn’t tell from the video was exactly how the pond fitted into the picture. Nor how the trees blocked it from the house. With a little squinting I can see just how the house will fit and where and now I set Dale to marking out her cottage garden. Bless her, she does exactly as she’s told.

“I’ve booked you into a little ol’ b’n’b,” she says as she drives. The little ol’ b’n’b is called the Hangar Hotel. It’s an aircraft hangar. It’s big enough to house a brace of Super Fortesses. There are thirty five rooms.

Next day Dale and Sam drive back and forth like Hansel and Gretel in mpvs and I work out that the natural line to the pond is close to due East – the Rabbit. I suggest a garden gate on this line and identify the smallest number of trees that have to go.

Bingo! The upshot is a perfect Sam Hap or Three Harmony configuration. Sam Hap which is based around the Twelve Chinese Animals, is one of the two major traditions of compass school feng shui. The underlying principle is that each of the Animals belongs in a certain location of the compass and cooperates with two others: Rat with Dragon and Monkey, the Horse with Dog and Tiger, Rooster with Snake and Ox and which concerns us, Sheep with Rabbit and Pig. So if we have a house facing, as we do, into the magical Sheep orientation which enjoys special health benefits, we are looking for energy in the direction of the Rabbit and Pig. And lo and behold we have a door at the Pig, water at the Rabbit and Sheep facing. These are all yang (or active) so I’ll need to balance them up with some stillness but that’s a great problem frankly. It’s been worth a ten-thousand mile round trip. The icing on the cake of course is that Dale and Sam are respectively Sheep and Pig. That’s tao biz.

Dale has marked out the perimeter. Sam summons the architect who is also the builder. He brings cinder blocks – breeze blocks to you – and I mark the line that the back wall must sit on. We find a partworked Comanche axe head which I ask him to bury under the wall. He is part-Comanche himself. I ask whether they have any geomantic tradition.

“The Comanche time all actions to respect the Sun and Moon,” he says. Sounds like feng shui to me.

This month only

This month the South which is ruled by fire, that is prominence, publicity, promotion and that sort of thing, holds the 8 Flying Star of wealth and progress. Orthodox advice is to steer clear of the South this year because it holds the unfortunate 2 Annual Star and make use of other areas for extroversion. However for numerological reasons which I won’t go into here, the 8 neutralises the bad effects of the 2. If you’ve followed so far, consider experimentally opening a door or window to the South to bring the attention of the world to your door er….or window.

Great Sheikhs

Shortly before Osama Bin Laden’s demise I was asked to comment on a house like his in Abbottabad, in a triangular plot. In effect such a shape lacks half the eight different varieties of energy. The cure is to use hedges and fences to restore it as far as possible to a regular shape. Best not to buy it at all. Too late now, I guess..

©Richard Ashworth 2011

The Chestnut Suite,

I’m just back from San Antonio – where I was surveying the Alamo which is an extraordinary place and spooky as hell – only to be confronted with a plague of these “Money Bags” viral emails. These are the ones that point out that there are going to be five weekends this July, which the email says, makes it a magical time and you’d better pass the message on or your hair’ll drop out. Many of you have referred them to me which strikes me as a pretty good idea.

So is this real traditional Chinese feng shui?

Broadly no: classical feng shui draws on the theory of the Five Elements or wu xing. It’s not really bothered by the arbitrary durations of the months of the Gregorian Calendar. Clearly there will be five weekends in each month of thirty-one days approximately once every seven years. The Gan Zi Cycle of Sixty Animals, runs on regardless of this.

There are strict rules as to how the Five Elements interact, they appear for instance in precisely the same order every day and every year: the light of Wood followed by the acceleration of Fire, the taking stock of Metal and the watching and waiting of Water while Earth fills the gaps in between. Dawn and Spring bring fresh light and life, midday and Summer bring rapid movement and visibility, Autumn brings harvesting just as late afternoon is the time for cashing up followed by the dark and cold of Water. The Elements combine and run from Wood Rat to Water Pig and so on and this has been going on forever while the Chinese have been tracking it since at least the 3^rd Millennium BCE. This July will be no different.

I’ve only seen “Money Bags” as a viral, never from a feng shui source. Now it may be that some of the information has got lost in transmission (such possibly as full and new moons for instance) but a situation that actually prevails approximately once every seven years is not so rare.

And there’s the possibility that with lost data added back in, some Master with ten times my experience can make some sense of it but its threatening tone, typical of the sort of virals I will not pass on, further suggests a non-professional source. There is a school of thought that employs classical feng shui to instill fear but I’m not keen on that either and I don’t think this is it anyway.

Finally if you’re interested in understanding the cycles of time, you might like to know that I am teaching my Ba Zi starter course Discover the Secrets of the Four Pillars of Destiny again this year, starting in December. Once you’ve completed it you’ll be able to draft a ba zi in Chinese characters – it’s not actually that hard – and begin to interpret. Early Bird Offers are running now.

Richard Ashworth May 2011