Gui

Gui is everything shut away inside the earth, germinating without a sound. As an image it is water going downward — dew, spring water, the damp in a place the light does not reach. Heavy in substance and yin in nature, what it describes is being netted: in it, unable to come back out.

• The net: something dropping over a situation the way a net drops, and no way back out of it once inside. Emotionally, the same thing — hemmed in, with nothing secure to stand on.
• Depth and thought: ideas, philosophy, and the networks that operate out of sight. The temperament that goes with it is plain and unguarded — it knows how to settle a quarrel, and it cannot tell a good actor from a bad one.
• Body and intimacy: a woman's intimate anatomy and matters of the bedroom, and by extension the people and situations that turn on them.
• Seeping water shows at the surface and again at the level it has sunk to. Above, on the heaven plate, Gui is the situation as it looks now and where the damp is spreading next; below, on the earth plate, the reading is how long it has been soaking in and what is quietly holding it there.

Gui and Ren (壬) are both Water, and the difference is direction of travel. Ren is flow in the open — moving, and still able to move. Gui is the layer that seeps down and is held: something is certainly happening, it just does not come back out.

Nature

The sensitivity is remarkable. When the temperature of a room changes, the person involved knows before anybody has spoken. Making noise holds no appeal — better to sit at the edge of it, watching and taking it in, letting experience settle inward. The surface stays flat while the water under it has not been still for a moment.

Style

Feel first, respond second, and always with a light touch. A situation gets changed by adjusting small things at the edges, never by walking into it head-on, and the person involved is in no hurry to speak until the moment is right. When things turn unstable the instinct is to step back before doing anything at all.

Strength

Perception and insight. The moods of other people, and the meaning sitting under what they actually say, come through clearly, and in a tangled situation the person involved can see the part nobody has said out loud. Research, counselling, psychological work and planning roles suit — and the quieter it gets, the more precise the judgement becomes.

Impression

Quiet, entirely without aggression, and people relax around them without noticing they have. Held well in, and deep with it. Never competing to be heard — and when the person involved does speak, it tends to land straight on the point.

Pitfall

Feeling gets pushed inward and conflict gets walked around. Whatever anyone says is heard at amplified volume, and putting up with it long enough turns the whole thing into internal wear. Carried further than that, the door simply closes.

In a building, Gui is the damp and the dirt in the places out of the light: the toilet and the passage behind it, waste water, network cabling, and every small container of liquid in the house.

• Objects: paint and sauces, cosmetics and perfume, petrol and cleaning products, ink, blood and tears — and shoes, and things that are black.
• Buildings and places: wetland and ponds, water towers, gullies and sunken wells, groundwater and septic tanks, and anywhere genuinely filthy.
• Outdoors: dirty water, marshy ground and ponds, sewage and standing pools — and also mist and rain.

The two forms Gui takes most often in a real environment are dirty water and the toilet. When either one turns up near the position being read, this is the stem to think of first.