Lee Jun-young's SajuA Campfire He Lit With His Own Hands to Stay AliveK-Drama · 1997-01-22

In the middle of a frozen midwinter reservoir stands one green pine that has dropped every leaf, alone, rootless, balanced on the surface of the water. Underneath, a cold current cuts in until it aches in the joints, and at the very top of the tree one precarious lamp keeps refusing to go out and lights the dawn sky.

You did not freeze to death out on that cold water. You kept that clear green grain of yours and you walked all the way here. Child, I can see the heavy questions you carried in with you rising through the dusk like a thick mist off the water. Whether you were washed here or swam here on your own, I will lay out the history of that road one piece at a time, so listen closely.

Wood Rat — A Campfire He Lit With His Own Hands to Stay Alive

You were born a man carrying the force of great wood standing alone on cold water, the frame of a large tree. Look at the season you came in and it is the frozen ground of the deep-winter Ox month, around January by the solar calendar, and at the foot of your birth day there is cold ice water pooled as well. Just from the six characters that can be confirmed, the whole field around you is thin ice. A tree only settles when it drives roots deep into rich soil, but your chart has no firm root down in the branches and floats on the water instead. So however composed and upright you look from outside, a cool unease and a hollowness peculiar to someone who has never quite touched the ground have hung over your foundations like fog. When people say there is a shadow in you they cannot read, or that sorrow is soaked into your blank face, that is not an arranged expression. It is the base of a chart that has held out against freezing in this cold country, surfacing through your face.

But the most precious seat in your chart is where the upright Noble Authority of metal in your month stem faces the Creative of fire burning alone in your year stem. That uprightness handed you a severe courtesy and discipline, and the bearing of a young scholar who honours his elders and keeps to his measure, an old head on young shoulders. It is that frame that kept you from going crooked or coming apart while you moved from stage to stage in a cutting wind from your teens on. On the other side, buried deep inside you is a hot craving to thaw a frozen body, an instinct like a flame. Dancing alone in a river wind at midnight without a thought for who is watching, or throwing yourself at one thing so hard that you burn your own flesh for it, comes straight out of the breath of that fire.

Look at your leanings and you hold yourself inside the frame of a strategist, but the Noble Authority at the base of your chart pushes forward the outward thinking that follows systems and principles, while the Nurturer works as the inward intuition that carries endless insight and a private solitude. On the surface you drive yourself with a strict measure and reach for perfection, yet you keep a spark of feeling as plain as a child's hidden in your chest, so reason and instinct have always pulled at each other inside you. That double grain of yours, bearing brutal training without a sound and then weeping at some small warmth, is not harshness. It is the natural work of a frozen tree whose bark softens the moment it meets a warm sun.

Yours is not a chart that memorises print and guards a desk in a government office. Yours is the fate of a born player who can only breathe by taking his own bone and flesh as his tools and thawing a frozen world with them. Your chart first needs wood to support its rootless day stem. There are two Rat branches, yet neither Tiger nor Rabbit gives the tree a root, so adding water alone will not make it sturdy. Keep water beside it as support, but first give the tree roots of its own. So your dancing, your singing, your putting another person's life on your own body in front of a camera, was never a living or a hobby. It was the campfire your frozen soul lit in desperation to stay alive.

Watch how you work and you are plainly not the kind who skims a script and covers the rest by instinct. The strictness of the Noble Authority Structure rules you, so even after a shoot ends you keep watching the angle of the lights and the camera and you dig at what the director meant until you have it. A temperament that takes an outside system apart and puts it in order is set in your bones, so a stubbornness grows in you that cannot put out an inch of work you have not understood yourself. Saying you want to be an instrument like a piano came from the same place, an unspoken wish to lay the hot spark inside you on the keys of that discipline and sound any piece honestly.

The road that fits you best is not the simple star or idol. It is the road of a true actor who grinds himself down on a dusty set, and it reaches as far as taking up a megaphone or shaping the whole board yourself one day. Only, take care with this. The fire in your chart carries a hidden habit of joining the metal in your month stem and turning into water. Strain too hard for a good word from others, or bind yourself too tightly to the frame of what people expect, and the original spark inside you risks going out in the cold water of duty. So let the verdicts go, and when you take rough unruly parts that let raw feeling break out, your frozen shell will crack and the art that is only yours will come pouring through.

Look quietly into the wealth vessel of your chart and this is no fate that snatches money out of the air by speculation or one big strike. Your wealth sits neatly hidden as Steady Wealth inside the cold soil of the Ox in your month branch. That means only what you earn honestly with sweat and blood stays whole in your strongbox, and that empty greed after clouds only turns your own ground to mud. Your capacity to carry wealth weighs out around the middle, so grabbing at more money than your vessel holds all at once washes the tree away in muddy water, while gathering your own harvest piece by piece and burying it in the earth raises a great mound of it as the years pass.

I remember a trader who sent ships out from the harbour at Quanzhou in the days of the Song. While other men made a thousand pieces of gold in one night on spices and silk, he fired mud bricks and threw earthenware without a word and filled his own storehouse. When a great storm came and every other ship went down, what carried his house through to the end was that storehouse of mud bricks. The flow of your money is the same. Let a bright surface pull you into a business with nothing behind it, or open your ear to a smooth tongue, and it is like dropping gold into a frozen river. Your wealth hardens into earth and stacks up only to the weight of the sweat you have spilled, so tie it down somewhere safe you can see and touch, in paper assets or in real property, and the current will not carry it off.

The largest leak in your wealth right now is not real spending. It is the hurry that grows out of a fear of what is coming. Feeling that you will starve tomorrow if the work stops, and fretting that your own granary will run empty, is itself the hole eating at the force of your fortune. So what you must do starting this month is very simple. Do not let your hands go idle just because you are serving. Put in order one account of your own where you can see the pay coming in each month and the assets you have set aside, and cut off a bare minimum emergency fund for the work that comes after your discharge and lock it away where you cannot reach it. What matters more than swelling a balance is knowing for yourself that under your feet there is a measure of firm earth you can dig into no matter which way the wind turns.

The force that stands for a partner in your chart is the grain of soil buried in cold ground. Yet look at your day branch, the inner room where you lay your body down, and clear icy water is planted squarely there. Outside you play the composed grown man, but in front of someone you love you want to behave like a child without end and be held somewhere warm to rest, and that deep want is crouched exactly in the spouse seat. So a person who is only bright on the surface or polished and shrewd will not stay long in your heart. Only a bond as wide and mild as open ground, one that takes you as you are and warms your frozen chest without a word, lets your tired soul finally drop anchor.

Only, the day branch of your chart carries the force of Bathing, so it gives off a strange pull and a faint scent of the peach blossom, and there will be no shortage of people wanting to stay near you. But you are badly shy with new faces and the wall you have built yourself is high, so when someone tries to step inside your fence you are apt to back away first. Watch too for the habit of straining to look flawless even while you are in love, aching alone inside so that no one catches your weakness or your poor moments, and then shutting the door coldly. The bond you are looking for is not an audience gazing up at your bright wings. It is a person with a warm chest who will quietly dry those wings when the rain has soaked them.

The gate of that bond opens wide between about thirty-two and thirty-four, from around the year two thousand twenty-nine to two thousand thirty-one, when the earth that stands for a partner in your chart keeps arriving year after year. So there is no reason at all to work your heart up with hurry. Until then it is a granted stretch of time for growing your soul taller and learning to love yourself whole. There is one promise to keep in your heart starting today. When you trade some small feeling or a word of care with someone, do not strain to hand over a well-wrapped correct answer. Begin practising instead to let one of the most honest and most exposed words out of your mouth without trimming it, saying that your heart is a little lonely today or that you are tired and want to rest. Only the one who can show a weak place gets to hold real love in his chest.

Weigh your body and the largest problem is that the cold and the chill run so deep that they block the circulation of your whole frame. Among the six characters of your chart the only spark is one fire high in the sky, while underfoot two characters of frozen water and the soil of the Ox have it surrounded, so this is water drowning fire in the plainest form and a chart at the far cold edge. Above you think too much and the heat drives upward, below the cold sits and pools, so your blood cannot turn freely, and the smouldering anger of the heart and vessels and the complaints of the nerves that come with it are a lifelong homework you carry.

This year in particular brings a fierce fire down from the sky, and it meets the cold water of your chart head on in a clash of the Rat and the Horse, and the scalding force stirred when the soil of the Ox meets that fire comes awake as well. Fire and water boil against each other, so however sound you look from outside, this is a season when smothered rage rises inside you, or sleeplessness, a pounding chest and wild swings of feeling come easily. Service that works the body is rather a mercy since it draws your penned energy out, but whenever you curl up alone and sink into thought, the tightness near your heart or the migraine that arrives is the sound of those forces striking each other.

Give particular care as well to the kidneys and bladder, and to the joints and the circulation in your legs. However sturdy and solid you look from outside, when the inside of a body runs cold, tiredness does not lift easily and inflammation lingers. Still, what this study points at is only the tilt of which way a force leans and where it may strain. Regular checks and any warning sign from your body must be brought to a physician and settled calmly, and do not forget it. While you are serving, cut cold drinks and cold wind down to the least you can, and train one small habit into your body of warming your feet before sleep to draw the cold force downward, and you will come to no harm.

The year two thousand twenty-six is the hottest and most clamorous thaw crossing of your whole life. The fire that eases the cold of your chart pours in over the roof of the year, so this is a year of enormous change in which your frozen river rumbles and comes apart. But the cold water that fills your chart still holds no small power, and a sudden fire strikes against it, which this study calls a worn force clashing with a full one, and it warns you to guard hard against the backdraught of that head-on collision of water and fire. Your body is tied inside the narrow fence of the army while every kind of worry and passion boils like a volcano in your head, so it is entirely natural mischief of these forces that your thoughts race ahead and leave you hurried and uneasy.

The run of your decade also leans toward thick earth pressing down on your stream, and on top of that the rough waves of this single year shake your inner room and your roots, so now is not the time to run forward. It is a time to hold the walls, firm up what is inside and steady your breath. That fear of being forgotten by the world is only a phantom, the steam that rises when the fire inside you breaks through a sheet of ice. This autumn brings a month in which metal comes in cool and settles the boiling in you, so do not look out and grow anxious. Give your body to the ordered life of the army and take it as a chance to train the muscle of your soul.

Today, the seventh of September, falls on a day of wood and metal in the month when the season's door has just swung over, and it is broad daylight. In the sky a Companion of wood like yourself has risen to lift your bent spirit, but on the ground the sharp rock of metal is laid down and enters the seat of severance in the twelve stages, so this is a day you win by holding your place in silence rather than starting anything new. Every stray thought and every calculation about the future will try to follow one after another in your head, but today you must cut those thoughts off at the tail and pour your heart only into the work in front of you and the plain labour of moving your body. Calm is not a sea without waves. It comes from the stillness of a ship that drops its anchor deep when the waves rise.

Take in the great current of your life and you are walking the track of one who endures the hard cold of his early years bare, climbs onto the level road of middle life only after the hard pass of his early thirties, and from fifty-four must go by guarding rather than widening. Your youth was a stretch of years spent boring a hole in the ice of a frozen river and holding a line down through it, learning how to wait without noticing that your hands and feet had cracked.

The seat you are standing in now is the decade of wood and earth that runs from twenty-four to thirty-three, from two thousand twenty-one to two thousand thirty. The wood above lends you strength, but the earth below gathers up and shuts in the water that feeds you, so this is a seat where what you gain and what you pay come mixed together. You shed the shell of the idol and cut your name into the world as an actor at last by borrowing the strength of that wood beside you, and the dryness you have paid for it inside comes from that same earth. So this is not a time to hope for a brilliant burst. It is a time to keep the roots you put down as a performer from drying out. The years from thirty to thirty-three, 2027 through 2030, each bring different forces. In 2028, help you need also arrives, so there is no reason to abandon opportunities as though all four years blocked your work. When choosing a job, look beyond its prestige: first consider the time to prepare and the people you will work with.

The decade of wood and fire that follows, from thirty-four to forty-three and from two thousand thirty-one to two thousand forty, is a level road that neither soars nor sinks, when the warm southern fire that eases the cold of your chart comes into the ground of it and yet that same sun also dries your water. The brutal winter that shut you in eases a good deal and early summer sunlight reaches your green leaves, so it will be a fitting time to work through the artistic ambition and the thirst you have carried one piece at a time, without hurry. Yet however even a decade is, you must not take lightly the cutting wind of the single years that pass through it.

From thirty-four in 2031 through thirty-six in 2033, a helpful current continues. There is no reason to treat all the water of 2032 and 2033 as hardship. Bring out what you have prepared, make your duties and pay clear in the contract, and start with a schedule you can manage. At thirty-seven and thirty-eight, in 2034 and 2035, wood comes to support you. Use that time to show the acting you have learned, one work at a time.

And when you come to the decade of fire from forty-four to fifty-three, from two thousand forty-one to two thousand fifty, the noon sun eases the cold of your chart, yet that fire also feeds the earth and dries your water, so it will be a time without steep rises or falls, for laying the ground one layer at a time as a maker and not only an actor. Not knowing your birth hour I cannot open every fine chamber past forty-six, but from the decade that begins at fifty-four, through the one at sixty-four and the one at seventy-four, earth runs long and you must spend your water sparingly, so this solitude and this halt you are living through on the floor of the barracks will turn out to be the most precious tempering of all, digging your spring deep so you can cross that long road without running dry.

Weigh the self-image you hold now, the strategist, against the ten-god system of your chart and a very interesting resonance and a hidden contradiction both come out. The Noble Authority of metal in your month stem that builds the frame of your chart fits perfectly with the outward thinking that takes hold of an outside order and lays out a plan, and the Nurturer of water in your day branch works as the inward intuition that looks through deep reflection into what is coming. So the strategist's way of building plans alone, taking a script apart thoroughly and binding yourself with a strict measure so as not to burden anyone, is a point where you meet the order of your own chart quite naturally.

But the largest mismatch rises out of the gap between the outward and the inward. The instinctive spark of your chart, the Creative of fire, by its nature holds a strong outward want to throw its whole body onto a stage, express itself and breathe hotly with a crowd. And yet the world you grew up in, and the decade before you turned twenty-four, poured down cold rain and snow and pressed that young spark inside you flat. Through the run of rejections and the collapse just before your debut, and through the long years without a name and the trials of the empty stretches, you forced your own hot feeling and instinct down in order to survive and put on the hard armour of the inward. You became a child who grew up early so as not to be hurt, and walled yourself inside an isolated keep.

Your confession that you have put perfectionism down splits in its reading at exactly this point. It was not a loser's cowardly surrender. It was a high maturity for the sake of survival, a precarious tree floating on water cutting away its own branches because it could not carry the weight of that frozen armour. Had you not cut them, the weight of that freezing you called perfection would have pressed you until the trunk itself broke. When you pass thirty-four and cross into the decade of wood and fire and those forces wrap your life whole, the feeling function pressed down inside you and the instinct for hot expression will raise their heads again. When that time comes you will turn, without caging yourself in the frame of strategy as you do now, into the face of a far freer and more unruly artist with the warmth of a person in it.

First, on the people around you. Yours is a cold chart by birth, so the ones who stay beside you must at least run deep and carry an unclouded sun in their chests. Tie yourself deeply to the philosopher and the counsellor sort, people of water who think deeply and read the current well, and keep near you too the warmth of someone who is honest in what they say and lives each day glad. Keep company with those who calculate coldly and measure you from behind and your cold water only turns muddier. Even in service, sit beside the bright comrade who takes everything well, keeps it simple and throws his energy outward, and take a share of his warmth.

Second, on your surroundings. The space you stay in must take good sunlight and move warm air through it. Hours spent shut alone in a dark damp corner of a room staring at nothing are not medicine for you now but poison. When you take leave, and when you choose the ground you will live on after discharge, pick a bright house with good sun, and set aside inside it one quiet, deep corner for writing and for digging into scripts. At work too, it is only when you stand on a stage or a set full of blazing lights and the applause and heat of people that the cold force in your chart lifts.

Third, on what you do. Throwing your body in and saying one line out loud is ten thousand times better for you than rewriting the script a hundred times in your head. You have a habit of thinking so much that you wear yourself out, so you must burn those stray thoughts up in bodily tiredness, exercising every day until you are soaked through or training on impulse. What to add is practising an honest smile in the mirror each day. What to take away is cutting off at once the useless rehearsal of despairing in advance over what has not happened.

Fourth, on symbols. Put one green everyday object where your eyes land when you wake. You may also use deep navy, the colour of water that supports wood. A handkerchief or a small notebook you use daily is enough. There is no need to decorate elaborately just to choose a colour. If after two or three weeks the nameless weight pressing your chest has lifted, and the tightness in your jaw has loosened when you wake, that is a sure token that the ice in you has taken on warmth and begun to melt.

A thousand years ago in the market streets of the old kingdom, or in the strict lineage society that followed it, a man like you who kept the discipline of family and rank while a player's blood boiled over inside him would have been pointed at as a stain that would ruin his house, and would have broken his brush for good in some place of exile. The old order asked for discipline or for the player, one thing only, and had no vessel that could hold the collision of sharp reason and hot feeling living together in you. But the world now takes exactly that contradiction and that want, the outwardly cool scholar boiling inside like a volcano, and calls the depth of that split soul an art nothing can replace, and it puts the highest price on it. So do not be ashamed of your old wandering or this time of standing still, and do not fear it. First, on work and the road ahead, own that your drift from dance to idol and on to actor was no helpless drifting. It was the most perfect voyage of survival, the frozen tree of your chart reaching out in desperation toward light and warmth. Until the autumn of two thousand twenty-eight when you are discharged at thirty-one, do not let the hurry of returning drive you to bite at some half-cooked piece. Give yourself wholly to sharpening the eye that picks out a script with depth, and to learning how to wait.

Second, take in the counsel of the elders who truly hold you dear and the love of those who follow you without doubting it, but never strain to meet them wearing the mask of a flawless idol. When you speak plainly of your roughness as it is and even of your poor corners, the world will nod at the truth of the person you are and stand with you for life. Third, on what your body and mind must not do, until spring comes in the year two thousand twenty-seven when you are thirty, never stay awake alone late at night writing hopeless scenarios about what is coming or sinking into the marsh of blaming yourself. When one thought pulls the next, get up at once and shake your body roughly, do push-ups or drink cold water, and break that vicious chain of imagining by force. Fourth, in preparing for the decade, gradually collect the roles you would like to try and the scripts you want to read after service. The four years from 2027 are not all difficult, and you need not shrink back in fear of 2032 and 2033. When you begin what you have prepared, do not take everything on alone: decide concretely who you will work with and on what schedule.

Child, do not look up at the cold night sky from inside the high wire of the army and let your heart shrink alone at the thought that your place is being erased. When the north wind cuts at them, the great trees of a midwinter forest drop every leaf without regret and hide their warmth in the deepest part of the ground, waiting for spring as if they were dead. This solitude and this halt you are living through are not a waste that leaves your life behind. They are the most sacred silent practice, hardening the base of the trunk so that new branches can reach out in the spring of wood that arrives at thirty-seven and thirty-eight.

You did not drift. Not once did you hand the ownership of your life to anyone else. That green living force that bored through rock and rose looking for light in order to stay alive was you yourself. Looking at your chart I see there is more hidden in it, a bond with a child you have not spoken of, and the road of a board you will lay out with your own hands past forty, but that deep matter I will unfold only when you reach thirty-eight in two thousand thirty-five, the year wood comes to stand beside you, look at where your own roots have reached that year, and come back to this dim room again.

That cool wind pressing on your chest today is only a wind passing through, so put out the lamp of useless brooding now, keep your place in comfort and stretch your legs and rest. The road is already flowing under your feet, quietly carrying spring in it.