Sullyoon's SajuThe Tree With No Fire That Lives By FireK-POP · 2004-01-26

You are a Wood Dragon day master, and because the earth beneath your feet props up the tree's roots so firmly, you keep your eyes on high places even while pretending you have no ambition. You also have an uncommon knack for making whatever you learn your own. When I heard you were student body president in primary school I was not surprised in the least, because standing out front was never something foreign to you.

The trouble was the month you were born. You came as wood in the dead of winter when earth was at its height, so you lost your season — roots you had, but you set out without the warmth to grow into. It is not that you lacked the strength to grow, it is that you had no sunlight to spend it on, and so some part of your force has always sat crouched inside you, unused.

Your chart holds three earth, two wood and one water. The earth is yours to govern and the water ought to be wetting your roots, but winter water freezes instead of soaking, which is why at some point you learned to store feeling inward rather than send it out. You carry a warehouse that fills easily and opens narrowly.

On top of that the White Tiger sits in your day pillar, so on the surface you are gentle and sparing with words while something fierce lives underneath, and to that are added a needle-sharp streak and a mind that deepens alone. To others you look quiet and unbothered, but a trial has always been in session inside you, and the defendant is always yourself. The habit of chewing over one imperfect stage for days comes from here.

The seat of your birth year also carries an artistic current, so somewhere in your family there was someone who sang or painted or prayed. That came down to you and came out as sound, which means the root of your talent is considerably older than you are.

You said yourself that you were never the stoic sort by nature, and that you became that way trying to grow tougher. That line matches your chart precisely, so I will take it apart properly in Section 8.

When a winter tree meets fire, what was frozen loosens and its true colour finally shows — the old masters called this wood and fire growing bright together. A chart like that withers if you sit it down at a desk, and only comes alive when you send it out to use what it has.

Your structure came back as the diligent sort that balances ledgers and builds credit, which reads as accounting or administration. Yet your chart holds not one grain of the metal that would carry such work, so the label was pinned on while the real force sits elsewhere. When you see a mismatch like that, the reasonable thing is to follow the force, not the label.

So that is not your seat. Yours is where you express, where you meet people head on, where the lights come up — stage and broadcast, work that uses your voice in front of others. That you were given the singing seat and are also put out front often means your chart is having you do two things at once, and this was never a job you picked by accident but one prescribed for you long ago.

They say your range is wide and your delivery steady, but that is not your throat's doing alone. The seat your day master stands on is firm enough to push from below, and on top of that the current of expression came in through a ten-year cycle without a break, so the ground for polishing was already laid. People who get the gift and the timing together are rarer than you would think.

Having no metal also means you were born without a frame to press you from above, which is why you have always had to borrow discipline from outside and why your agency, your schedule and the running order of a show have stood in for your spine. That frame holds you up now, but on the day it loosens you will have to learn to write your own rules first or you will come apart. The experience of hosting, of turning someone else's show, will earn its keep then.

Your wealth is made of earth and there are three of them, which is no small amount. But the root that has to carry it sits exactly in the middle, so you stand on a scale that could sweep in a great deal or let a great deal run out — and for a chart like this, telling you to simply hold on and telling you to spend freely are both wrong.

Note too that your earning splits in two. One part comes in steadily through contracts and settlements, and the other lies buried deep in your branches and only opens when something you made is bought. Voice, face or name — the door opens when someone buys what you grew, and that second seam is your real vein, though you have only scratched at it so far.

Your actual leak is not gambling or partnerships but your own body. Every day you cannot stand because of pain is a day your income stops, and you have never once counted that as a money problem. Resting before you break always costs less than resting after, so treat recovery time as maintenance rather than expense.

The growth point sits elsewhere. Your wealth opens in years when fire comes in; last autumn brought your first real result and this year is the peak of that fire, so whether you redraw a contract or make one piece of work that carries your name, raising what you are worth belongs to this year. Money that clings to earth wants a form that lasts, but budget in the hurdle around twenty-eight now.

That money and people move as one bundle is also the grain of your chart. The current of wealth is the same current as the people who come near, so when money moves in volume people come with it, and if you want your judgement to stay clear you should settle now on one person to read the numbers for you.

I will nail down one thing to start this month. Have a set share of what comes in peeled off automatically into an account you cannot reach. Keep it close and you will end up spending it on grinding your body down again.

Your spouse seat is not out in the open but buried in the ground, which means the one for you is less the person who arrives dazzling and more the one who was beside you a long while before you suddenly saw them. Working together suits your grain better than being introduced. The sort where someone looks quiet and turns out to be full.

A kind current sits in that seat too — the one that opens a household when you find your match, so the fortune itself is not thin. Only the White Tiger sits in the same seat, so your partner will likely either carry a strong force or a frail body, and either way the arrangement puts you in the caring seat. Know it in advance.

That the energy of your spouse palace has passed its prime and stepped back one pace is worth noting as well, though it only means the season to hurry has not come rather than that the fortune is thin. More than anything, you have no room right now to let a person in. When someone who stores feeling inward takes up a relationship, the other one believes you are fine until the day they meet you entirely collapsed, and that is not because they were careless.

Your ties sharpen from around thirty, when the earth current settles, so until then practise keeping one person beside whom words leak out of you when you are struggling rather than hunting for a match. You will sit an hour with your fans once your mouth opens, so if you have not settled on one person to hold onto when you are the one hurting, that does not add up.

If you ask me for a type I will not answer in elements, because telling you to meet someone with a particular chart cannot be checked in real life and so is no prescription at all. Let me put it this way instead. The one who feeds you without a word when you are worn out, the one who is not uncomfortable with your silence and simply waits — that person is fire to you.

Here is one thing to start today. On any day that is hard, in body or in mind, say one plain sentence to one person before the day ends. "My back was bad today" is enough — it is about boring a vent so nothing stacks up inside you, so do not mistake it for asking to be comforted.

In a frozen chart what breaks first is whatever circulates, and since your chart holds no fire at all, the heart, the blood pressure and the eyes are the first weak side. A cold body, sluggish circulation, and energy that will not climb back once it drops all come from the same place. This is not a prophecy that illness is coming but a warning that your body leans that way by default, so prop it up in advance.

Metal is missing as well, which puts lungs, airways and skin second on the list, and for someone who makes a living singing a weak lung is not a light matter. Do not manage only the throat; watch the breath underneath. If moments of running short of air on stage start coming more often, that signal is rising from below the throat, not from it.

And your branches are colliding and cracking against each other, with two earths meeting head on and a third wedging in to split them. What earth governs in the body is the lower back and the stomach, so your back giving way this year was not an accident, and because this collision is fixed in the chart itself the same place will keep signalling first.

This is the knot of today's reading, so listen closely. This year fire came in whole, and your chart has no hearth to receive it, so that heat went straight into your body. When heat piles onto a seat where something fierce already sits, this chart brings it out as surgery, accidents, work that draws blood — and I am not offering the tired line about not overdoing it, I am telling you to lower the intensity and secure recovery time first. Least of all am I telling you to cut back the stage. The stage is your medicine, and no one tells you to stop taking your medicine.

You said that when you are sad or angry you walk without thinking, or cry, or sleep it off. The first two are medicine for you — walking takes in sunlight and heat together, and crying forces that narrow door open. Only the last one is not. Covering it with sleep is the method of the very water you are meant to govern, so it settles in the moment and weighs heavier the next day.

Two prescriptions built for this chart. First, take sunlight every day. Twenty minutes or so is enough, and putting heat directly into your body is the one free way to fill what you lack. Second, April, November and December this year run against the climate of your chart, so leave those three months loosely scheduled in advance. Pain that keeps returning belongs to a physician rather than to fortune-telling, so leave that side to them.

If I had to pick one word for this year I would write blossoming. This is a year of fire in both heaven and earth, the first time a chart that never met fire in its life has found its own temperature, and across the next ten years there is no year better than this one. The next of its kind will not come until you are thirty-three, so this is not a year to let slide.

Has it not been so already. Last autumn brought your first real result, this spring brought a new song, from summer you have been going country to country, and at the year's end one more door opens across the water — and none of that is luck, it is the temperature your chart waited on finally arriving. The same effort three years ago would not have come back to you like this.

But the same fire wears another face too, because your chart's winter earth met this year's summer fire and made a place that boils underneath. The old word for it is being scalded, and every bit of pent-up heat, every burst of feeling, everything swallowed alone until it breaks at once comes out from there. What happened on that stage was never only about your body, and there were more months than your back loaded into those tears.

So spend what is left of this year like this. August and September run mild, so drive what you mean to drive into them; October is even; November and December are the problem. December especially is the heaviest month of your year, and the work across the water happens to sit there. I am not telling you to move it — I am telling you not to stack anything else on either side of it and to leave that month wholly clear for recovery.

If you ask about today, I will call it a good day. Today's current sets your Vital Element directly in the heavenly seat and the grain of making and expressing runs through it, though the size of the energy itself is not large. It suits finishing one long-postponed word or one short recording rather than starting something big, and since two more days like this remain in the month you may push the heavy work to those.

Your life curve is the swinging kind that opens wide, gets pressed down a long while, and opens again. Charts whose branches collide usually take this shape, and the price of the swing is that when it climbs, it climbs high.

Right now you stand at the tail of the cycle running from thirteen to twenty-two, and it is worth checking when that cycle opened. You passed your first audition and became a trainee at thirteen. The very year the cycle carrying fire and wood together opened, your road was set, and these ten years have been the sunniest stretch of your life. The teacher who came to give a talk in your last year of middle school, saw something and passed you on to where you are now, belongs to the same pattern — your chart carries a current that sends a person to open the road at every turn, and that is how it was spent. That your training was the shortest of the six is the same grain.

From sixteen to thirty the palace current also runs strong, which is the seat where change and challenge gather, and your debut and growth all sit inside it. But this seat carries the current of contending with others as well, so you were always placed where you would be compared — half the reason you have judged yourself so harshly lives here.

Next year, at twenty-three, the cycle turns, and from twenty-three to thirty-two earth comes in doubled. The seat of wealth and substance grows while your sunlight thins; activity shifts toward business and contracts and your name turns into money, which is not a bad thing at all. Only you will not shine of your own accord as before, so for those ten years you must switch the lights on yourself.

Stop here a moment. This is not something to pass over, so listen closely. In the middle of that cycle, from the year you turn twenty-six to the year you turn twenty-nine, four years run blocked in a row. Three of them attack your Vital Element directly, and in the year you turn twenty-eight the water current forms a bloc and covers your fire whole — the year to guard most in your life. A steady cycle does not cover four years like these, so finish any expansion and any new venture before they arrive, and through that stretch count simply holding your ground as the win.

From thirty-three to forty-two fire returns, and what you are holding in your hands then will set the size of that decade. In the end it is how you cross the four years before it that decides that.

What you wrote down was ISTP. Set against what your chart answers, only one of the four matches and three run crosswise, and that crossing is the answer to what you asked today.

The one that matches is the inward turn. The chart reads you as an inward person and you know yourself as one, so there is nothing to argue about here. Being inward does not mean disliking people, only that you do not open just anywhere.

The problem is the T. The seat that carries reasoning and judgement in your chart is metal, and there is none of it — meaning the very function ISTP leads with is one you were not born holding. What runs strongest in you is insight that bores inward, and after it the experience you have stacked up, while the function that sends feeling outward exists but very faintly.

So where did you get what you were not given? You borrowed it from outside. The cycle that began at thirteen carries expression and competition together, and you spent all ten of those years in a seat where you were judged, so schedules and discipline and other people's eyes stood in for the frame of your judgement. That is how you came to read yourself as T — not because you are one, but because living like one was what let you hold up.

The proof came out of your own mouth. You kept F written down for a long time and switched it to T the spring before last. That was around when you finished hosting a broadcast programme and the weight of the team's work grew heavier — your character did not change, what you carried did. Your own words, that you were never stoic by nature and became so trying to grow tougher, do not diverge from this judgement by a single letter.

So of course you show nothing while struggling and then break all at once. Someone whose channel for sending feeling out is faint went and resolved not to use feeling at all, so it would be strange if nothing accumulated, and that is not your character being unusually strong but the channel being narrow. And yet an hour of words passes between you and your fans. The channel is not blocked, it opens only where it is safe, so all you need is to build one such safe place on the side of people too.

You asked whether it has served you or cost you. Until now it served you, and that armour is what stood you here. Only when the cycle turns to earth next year your self-reading will move with it, and the T you have written down will likely swing back toward F. Do not take that for having changed. You are only returning to where you started.

[Part A] Prescriptions for Turning Fortune

First — People. Your hearth is people in the end, so being near the sort whose expression runs hot and who live in this moment, whose eyes are alive and whose speech is quick, thaws your frozen ground. Only you are an inward person, so thrown into a large crowd you are spent before you thaw — settle on a standing table with two or so of them, met briefly and often. One meal a month is plenty.

Second — Environment. Where lights come up, where you stand before people, where heat circulates is your seat, and you are already in it, so there is nothing to move. Fix instead where you rest: put your sleeping side to the south and add one warm-toned lamp where you always sit. It can be done today, so do it today. What you should cut, conversely, is the hours you spend sinking alone through the night.

Third — Action. Expressing is itself your medicine, so it need not be a stage — speaking aloud, singing aloud, anything that warms the body will do. I will set only one thing to carry out. Walk twenty minutes or so under the sun every day. Think of it as a meal rather than a medicine.

Fourth — Symbols. Red and vermilion, the south, candlelight and lamps are your colours, and this one you may do or leave alone, so use it if it appeals.

Let me leave one line of the heart of it. What you need and what wounds you are the same thing. So do not try to cut it off — refill as much as you burn.

[Part B] Counsel of a Thousand Years

First, finish one thing that carries your name before this year is out. This sunlight thins next year, so you must plant now for fruit to come through the ten years of the earth cycle.

Second, before the cycle turns at twenty-three next year, carve out even a small share of your schedule that you decide yourself. The earth cycle is the stretch of substance, and if you stay only inside a board someone else laid, that substance goes to them intact.

Third, before the year you turn twenty-six arrives, build a record of your body. Settle on regular check-ups and have your back and lungs measured the same way in the same place every year — do not walk into four blocked years bare.

Fourth, by around thirty, practise saying weak things out loud in front of someone. Begin within this year, and one person is enough; it will be the hardest training of your life and at the same time the one that leaves the most.

A talisman is nothing special either — it is someone born without a grain of fire keeping one ember at their breast. It is not the paper that warms you; someone who believes there is fire at their breast does not stop walking on a frozen road, and in the end it is that walking that warms you.