The walk takes me past the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist which dwarfs the houses either side. In the front window are quotations from Mary Baker Eddy. “You are safe,” one reads. I must have been twenty before I was sure that Ms. Eddy neither sang duets with Jeanette McDonald nor played the twangy guitar on the “Peter Gunn Theme” but over the years her message has suffered worse misunderstandings than these. “You are safe,” the banner reads. Always good to know.

Certain buildings feng shui Masters call “Dragons’ Lairs” because they are equal parts bear trap and treasure house. Activating the correct spot in such a dwelling at the correct moment can be followed by unfeasible good fortune, the wrong one by a plague of boils. Only a feng shui Master would knowingly take one on. This building, part church, part reading room, part sales office, looks like just such a construction.

It’s the 23rd and after energising the downstairs loo of a period house in Berkshire between the hours of six and eight in the morning, I’m back in Godalming prior to another trip to South East Asia, the topic of study this time being ba zi in physical healing, the place where feng shui meets Traditional Chinese Medicine. This information is likely to percolate into my ba zi teaching later in the year just as Xuan Kong Da Gua has entered my feng shui teaching (commercial break: on which the Early Early Bird offer runs out next week).

As I pass the paper shop in the pouring rain, I notice that the hosepipe ban shares headlines with the skullduggery in China. The ten-yearly reshuffle of the hierarchy at the People’s Congress approaches. Sixth-in-line Bo Xi Lai is fingered as a conspirator to murder. This has nothing to do with justice; the allegation arises not as part of the slow grind of the wheels of the law but because Bo has crossed some line in the internal politics of the PRC. There is every indication that had Bo minded his ps and qs, the rapidly cremated body of apparently poisoned businessman Neil Heywood would remain under the carpet so to speak. Q is of course pronounced “ch” in Wade Giles Mandarin, btw (just as the x in “Xi” is “sh”).

However hard it rains, Godalming never floods even though much of the town is below the level of the River Wey that runs through it. This is because of the flood meadow.This Lammas Land is mostly river from November to April which is why the town isn’t. This flood plain as its Celtic name (derived from Lug, God of Light) suggests, is as old as the town itself, upwards of sixteen hundred years probably. Feng shui is wind and water, the ancient principle being to preserve the water and protect against the wind. It’s easy to forget just how powerful Water is.

One Saturday afternoon several years ago, Sheila and I were walking our dog Zusu down by the river. The level was dangerously low, the water having that dusty look a too-shallow river gets, the fish too visible. Once home we rang the Water Board and discovered that there was a stopcock located in a building on the riverbank. A wheel was turned, the level was restored.

Mary Baker’s Eddy.
The events of this watery year 2012 can be expected to reflect previous Water Dragons: a Dragon’s Lair, poison and treasure. Such years include 1952, 1832 and 208BCE, all troublesome times for China. In 1952 Tibet was the treasure, annexed and never since relinquished, long-term not such a popular move with the natives. In 208BCE, Qin Xi Huang Di, having unified China with unbelievable brutality, lit out for the Eastern Ocean on a successful search for shamans to kill him with immortality potions. 1832? China is deep in the Opium Wars. Oh and Greece secedes from the Ottoman Empire. 1712: the South Sea Trading Company buys the national debt and sells it back to investors as junk bonds. Plenty of parallels to play with.

Toxic times indeed. As I walk into town, fleeing my office where there is more going on than I can concentrate over, I notice that there are now three nailcare shops. Although there are fewer pubs than there used to be, only one or two premises are boarded up. They will become restaurants in due course or Tesco Metros or be demolished and replaced with maisonettes at a quarter of a million per bedroom. This is banker country. Recession is something that happens to other people.

Despite the wealth of manicure options, there’s no Starbucks in Godalming as yet so I head for Costa which like approximately half the shops on this East-West High Street, faces due South and so enjoys a Flying Star pattern called “String of Pearls”. To cut a long story short, shops change hands but nobody goes bust. There’s always someone else ready to open a haute couture boutique as a tax loss. Or a coffee shop.

Unlike Starbucks, the coffee at Costa tastes like coffee, something I’d generally consider a disadvantage. That doesn’t matter however as I don’t drink it anymore. Coffee tends to desensitise when I need to be sensitive and we can’t have that, can we? These days I drink green tea for the most part. So what am I doing in a coffee shop? The truth is that I am drawn by the buzzing energy, the comings and goings, conversations that I half-hear, activity that demands nothing of me. I can be involved and not involved. It’s a place to hide if you like.

As the shop fronts due South, till, bar, coffee machines and staff are all in the South East. This means that in 2012 till, bar, steaming coffee machines and in the recent unseasonal heat wave, steaming baristas are all in the wu huang or Five Yellow as well as the tai sui, the direction of the year energy. These annual spots of sat chi or Poison Stars are not places to linger.

So I’m unsurprised that things appear to be going wrong around the engine room of the cafe. The flow from the boiler tap is down to a trickle. It takes the pretty young barista several minutes to pour enough boiling water onto a Twinings Green tea bag to fill a large cup. She’s studying law at Guildford Law College and reported for duty at 6:45 this morning, she tells me. And today, according to her young male colleague (Film Studies, Manchester) the till is not taking cards. He’s a bit hot under the collar. I’m not surprised. There’s no room behind the counter which itself is piled with enough confectionery to render the staff close to invisible. The counter is designed for all sorts of things but serving coffee is not one. It’s okay, I say, I’ve got cash and I can wait. Then all of a sudden he asks exasperated, of nobody in particular, “When is this going to be sorted out?” and I blurt out without thinking: “About six weeks,” and he looks at me as if I am criminally insane. Not the first to do that of course. Mouth open story jump out, as my first mother-in-law used to say.

I find a quiet table and make my tea bag last an hour. Every now and then someone I know walks in, greets me, we talk, I explain myself. Then I return to making sense of the Xuan Kong Da Gua material I’ve brought back from Thailand. This is powerful stuff.

Xuan Kong means “Mystery of the Void,” and the story goes that it was used in mediaeval times to hide armies in plain sight. The general who employed a XKDG Master could appear from nowhere right in the face of an unprepared enemy. I have been using this material for more than a decade now but the new slant I am working with gives the whole thing a fresh edge. While I work, the wife of my current problem client, an unemployed banker, emails to tell me he may have landed the job he wants. Thank God for that. XKDG properly measured, located and applied, should make a difference that quickly.

Having studied for ten hours-plus most days over there, I have mastered the bulk of the theory but there are three bits I don’t understand. They’re like an ache. I can not bypass them. Classical feng shui is like mathematics; there’s no point approaching stage two until you’ve mastered step one. By three pm, I’m deeply frustrated. I persevere. By five, two of the three problems are making sense. Thank God for that too.

It’s still raining on my way back and I want to ask the Water Companies some more questions. Just how wet does it have to get before I can water my sunflowers? What proportion of the lost water is due to leaky pipes and poorly secured reservoirs, what proportion overuse of river water by industry?

Finally, the last few windows before I’m out of town, I pass the hand-care shops. Expensively engraved upon the glass of one is:”Proffessional Nail Care.” I’m a Virgo. I was straightening up the pictures on other people’s walls long before I was paid for it. Two f’s where there should be one is almost as distressing as failing to understand Xuan Kong Da Gua. I have to look away.

You can get hybrid nail replacements now apparently. I’m frightened to speculate as to just what that might mean.

But of course we are safe. There is little to which the appropriate response is not a smile. Come hell, high water, death or the taxman, but especially high water, the Tao is both beyond control and worthy of trust. Not that the Tao gives a damn. It just goes on taoing its thing. So thank you Ms Eddy. We are indeed safe.

“Cutting edge cars and architecture but no better at handling traffic than London,” I laugh.
“Here on business?” he asks.
“To learn,” I answer.

He laughs several times on the way and is visibly appreciative of my small tip.

The admission of ignorance is the beginning of learning. I’m here to study date selection or zi re with Master Mas Kehardthum whose unorthodox approach appears to be the cutting edge.

I first came across Master Mas at the International Feng Shui Conference in Singapore in 2008. I remember Lillian Too flicking her magic scarf at him next to her. He had clearly pressed some buttons. Then I made a point of seeking him out at Montreux in September 2011 when the unorthodoxy of his date selection model became clear. It was possible he had the best and most authentic method I had come across.

Master Mas had two immediate claims to fame: one that in the summer of 2001 he warned a client to move out of the Twin Towers right away, the other that he had successfully selected in advance a date for a huge lottery win. At the Montreux assembly which had advertised five Chinese Masters and fielded one, the material he presented was both outstanding and, like the conference, clearly incomplete. I was intrigued enough to speak with and discuss studying with him during 2012. But I wanted to fill such gaps as I might first.

The gaps were clearly intended. If, like me, you have been working with Xuan Kong Da Gua (don’t ask) for a decade or so with results that tend to but never actually arrive at 100% reliable, you will have been as certain as me that there remained something missing in the information passed down from the ancient Masters.

Curious, I attended his presentation at the 2011 Singapore gathering six weeks later. The material was again not whole. But with a different piece missing.
This may if you are unfamiliar with the world of feng shui, seem weird: that deliberately incomplete or even inaccurate information should be routine. The fact is that many Masters still subscribe to the traditional position that the ”secrets of heaven should not be divulged.” A large proportion even of the small number of worthwhile feng shui books in English contain deliberate mistakes and omissions. Every teacher I have studied with, with the honourable exception of Derek Walters, has held back information.

Derek is incidentally in my experience pretty much the only European expert your average Chinese Master will offer the time of day. This is because he is respectful, learned, smart and does his homework. He knows and respects space-clearing, intuitive placement and Black Hat but knows that feng shui is a Chinese, Elemental thing.

So I found an air-conditioned Starbucks in a downtown Singapore mall, sat down for three days and pretty much worked it out. There remained holes but I was ready enough to email and book myself onto his next zi re training to fill them.

That’s the story so far.

The hotel is modern and large and so is my room. The toilet has an electronic flush with cartoons illustrating its use but I’ll draw a veil over that. Jet lagged to hell and back, I venture out. There are barrows of fresh fruit on the street. I am tempted by the deep red of the apples and the green of the melons but have a traveller’s fear of water-based street food.

Thai fruit is legendary. The rills and aqueducts I saw from the air were an indication why. This country is a market gardener’s paradise.

There are two city rail systems in Bangkok: the underground MRT, pretty much indistinguishable from those crisscrossing Singapore and Hong Kong and the Sky Train whose track, much like its Berlin equivalent, is twenty feet or so up in the air. I take the Sky Train, not so much tempted by its exotic name as funnelled by the crowds. Three or four stops later, I get out at a sign that says “Golden Buddha.” I walk there, put my red Converse All Stars into a handy bag and sit before the Buddha in a British ex-public school version of the Lotus posture. Tourists come and go. Every now and then a European is gently requested to take off a hat or put on a scarf. In central China this place would be a nightmare of cheap construction and sweet wrappers but here it’s magical. I intend to stay a minute or two and remain more than an hour. But for the odd fidget, I sit still, feeling the presence of God.

I carry no watch and I lose track of time, spilling out blissed and in touch with the universe. I unfold my City map, forgetting that this is the accepted international sign for “Please take money from me” and am jolted by an elderly Chinese man trying to sell me river boat trips. He’s stressed – I can feel the striving in him – but backs off gently when I turn down his offer.

Back at the hotel and out on the street, I am again struck by the affability of the people. Stall after stall is selling knock-offs. I have a shopping list of handbags to buy and I haggle clumsily which the stallholders seem to enjoy. There are Calvins for Joey, my teenager who hates to wear low slung jeans but appreciates both designer labels and a bargain. Even the hookers who line the street, smile gently. They don’t appear desperate like their opposite numbers in the West.

The Date Selection Class consists of twelve of Master Mas’ students and myself. Although they are a cosmopolitan selection largely from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and mostly Chinese by culture and race, as so often happens, the only language they have in common is English. No wonder the British are such poor linguists. There’s no need to learn languages and hence to understand other cultures. Whose loss is that?

The lovely Li, Master Mas’ star student introduces me to Dragon Fruit which looks like a decorated melon but tastes more like an impossibly rich pear. Young Yulius whose self-chosen European name speaks of a deep hinterland of classical scholarship, entertains the class by being unable to sit still. I can’t help noticing however, from his comments, that he picks up every point first time. A trio of Chinese housewives appear on the face of it to be sharing some man-free down time but are razor sharp also. Master Mas’ material is radical and rigorously logical, derived from first principles. After each six-hour day I retire to my room and write up my notes. It’s the only way I’m going to stay on top of this. So I’m pretty antisocial and don’t get to know these welcoming people as I might.

“May you live in interesting times” is how the Chinese curse goes. There are ways to explain a country this fertile and this contented. Buddhism in action is one. Constitutional monarchy is another. But the key I think, is that this bottomlessly gracious nation never goes to war. A dozen or so monarchs of the Chakri dynasty have for centuries avoided conflicts with neighbours as volatile as Laos and Cambodia, charming successive waves of acquisitive Portuguese, Dutch, and British, even convincing the Japanese to travel discretely across the Southern uplands to Malaysia rather than invade. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse generally arrive together. Tilled fields are a sign of a peace that can be trusted.

The current King Rama IX, is the longest-serving head of state in the world. Sixty-five years, since you ask, six more than our own monarch.
The only exception to my self-imposed purdah is a sumptuous barbecue at Li’s home. Her house is a temple to feng shui: wou lou shaped fence, blinking light at the propitious North East, floor receding towards the rear. And the acid test is that her husband and children beam, her house is large, unshowy and comfortable and the shrimps are the size of footballs.

After ten days I emerge to catch a dawn long haul. I’m in no state to teach this material just yet but I can start to use it. Almost immediately an email from Kruno in Zagreb who has just landed the job offer he sought, the afternoon of the first Activation I prescribe in the light of the new information, bears out that I now know something. Meanwhile those who will settle for what I knew already can register for the Wind that Stops at the Water, starting 23rd June. We’d love to see you.

Often feng shui offers solutions to the questions raised by the ba zi. A little attention to the right area at the right time and the world (at least from our perspective) is a changed place. So one conclusion I have drawn is to offer once again a course of study in pure Feng Shui. This will be open to those who have no prior knowledge of Feng Shui as well as to those who plan to take it very seriously. As with all my courses, it will be thorough but by no means exhaustive. Feng Shui is a lifetime study and in this four weekend course I plan to offer the tools to get you started.
Do come and join us.

More details here.

Dates
Weekend One: 23rd June- 24th of June
Weekend Two: 22nd September -23rd September
Weekend Three: 27th October – 28th October
Weekend Four: 1st December – 2nd December

All courses will take place in and around Guildford, Surrey between, roughly, 10am and 5pm.

Colour of course is a relatively minor item in the feng shui man’s arsenal, falling behind environment, orientation and the form of a building. Once these are taped however -which is generally a juggle between longterm energy patterns and the fresh ones that relate to the new year – the next priority is what’s happening where in the office and where each person is based. Some years the best place for accounts is where design was last year and sometimes everyone has to move round. I have actually advised two owners of castles to work in the round turrets where furniture can be easily reoriented annually. This is why the Ming Emperors had nine bedrooms and Mao a circular bed.

Kelly’s office is oriented East-West which offers advantages inconsistently year by year. When that’s the case, it’s especially important to take advantage of the year energy. In 2012, the Water Dragon, the year of Sudden Change, it’s important not to back onto the South. So sitting so as to face South works.

For Kelly however there are additional benefits to do with her ba zi (portable feng shui based on date of birth, often misleadingly called a Chinese Horoscope) and using the red Fire colours that are associated with the South accentuates this. I’m looking forward to hearing how all that works out. And no, I’m not going to tell you.

Accordingly in 2012 I will be less available, as for me it will be principally about writing and research. I want to ground some Chinese material I’ve not fully grasped while I seek out some fine tuning. This will involve me in travel to the Far East and elsewhere to consult the authorities as well as some deep thought. Two books, a tv series and a suntan are expected to follow this. Watch this space.

Meanwhile two contrasting books have come out lately by guys I’ve known a long time. “Withdraw some of your energy from drama and re-invest it in creativity and building your life,” writes Nick Williams. Bringing light to the world is a challenging call and his Resisting your Soul is a treasury of encouragement and good heart for those who would call light in. Age of Bewilderment by polymath and grump bucket David Sherrington however, is a primer for those who are looking for the switch and suspect the power has been turned off. Very funny in a mordant sort of way.

Whatever calculation you use, we’re now in the Water Dragon, the Year of Sudden Change: landslides literal and political, seismic events of all sorts. So hold onto your hat. What can happen, may.

Here’s the Readers Digest version of what to do for health, wealth and wellbeing in 2012:

1. Occupy, face, activate West, East, North East and (careful) South.
2. Don’t face North or South East.
3. Don’t dig or drill North West, South East or South.
4. Don’t expect much from the South West other than arguments.

There’s more, a lifetime of nuance and the fact that we always retain choice unruled by mumbo jumbo or random fate and this month I’m off toThailand to pursue the leading edge in Date Selection but broadly that’s it. If you want to make the feng shui changes properly there’s still time; you can get me in or there’s a Do-it-Yourself version of my Tune-Up Drill (including email back up) now available for a small(ish) fee. Apply within.

2. Roots

Doug makes me a cup of tea while we wait for the architect and the planning officer. We’re intending to take a couple of trees out of Doug’s garden. The trees are in the South West. Isn’t that asking for trouble? Yes it is. It’s literally asking for an argument. In 2012, we only do that sort of thing in the South West with great care. It has to be an argument that’s inevitable, that must take place before we can move on.

The planning officer is approaching retirement. He’s actually planning a move to Northumberland.

“Beautiful up there,” says Douglas.
He nods and purses his lips.
“Trees give a neighbourhood solidity, tradition, atmosphere,” he says. “Not the leylandii so much. Those are probably only five or six years old but they do do a job.”
He gestures at the 20 foot high wall of conifers at the bottom of Doug’s garden.
“It’s the oaks and the ashes, the chestnuts and the sycamores that mark a place out.”
The architect arrives, he’s younger and less philosophical.
We stumble out into the cold; too cold for snow.
The oak must be a hundred and fifty years old. It’s a little inhibited by the conifer growing under its canopy. The roof of the house is hard up to the conifer.
“Too close to the house,” says the architect. He can already see a third and fourth bedroom here.
“The cypress? I’m afraid you’re right,” says the planning officer. He has no ties locally, he says, only a ninety year old father in a home in Devon.
Beyond the garage is another smaller conifer.
“This has to go too, I think,” says the architect. He’s clearly right. But the oak remains a little too close to the house for his ambitions. He’s a rocker and a roller. He’s enthusing about a blues guitarist he’s going to see at Leicester De Montfort Hall. Doug’s interested- he likes his music- there’s a Buena Vista Social Club poster featuring Ibrahim Ferrer on the wall of the drawing room. I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never heard of the guitar player. I know the skilful manufacture of rapport when I see it though.
“Spindly for a mature cedar,” says the planner. “There’s some years in it nonetheless. Deceptive they are.” He expresses concern that the proposed bedroom (s) will be in the shade of the oak tree.
“We can deadwood it,” says the architect. “Do it the world of good.”
“I expect you’re right,” says the planner. They agree to exchange paperwork.
Apparently the trick to obtaining planning permission is getting the plans registered which the authority may resist because at registration a meter starts ticking that commits them to making a decision.

Apart from the potential bedroom(s) we’re moving the trees for a number of reasons, including that they squeeze the breath out of the South West. The South West is the area of the mature woman of course and of relationship. In his relationship with the very beautiful Tina, Doug feels constricted and is smart enough, brave enough and sensitive enough to conclude she does too, even though the feeling is unspoken. The path around the house on that side needs freeing up because it effectively cuts off a chunk of the garden to the front but this lopping is also deliberately provocative. He knows these things need to get out into the open and this will do it. That intention is registered now. He’s committed to a decision.

We all shake hands. The architect is full of plans. He’ll be running them by me and I’m sure they’ll be first class. The civil servant shuffles off. I doubt I’ll see him again. I think I hear the oak let out a breath.

“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.

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 21st 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 21st 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 14th largest economy in the world and the largest Spanish speaking nation, one of the focus nations of the 21st 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-19th 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 21st 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.