What can you say about a year from the information contained in two symbols? If you study Ba Zi, the answer to that question is: much more than I can write about in this lifetime. Let’s focus on what is relevant about the Wood Dragon pillar in 2024.

Wood Dragon Pillar

甲	yang Wood
辰	Dragon

The pillar consists of Heavenly Stem yang Wood 甲 sitting on top of Earthly Branch 辰 Dragon whose main element is 戊 yang Earth. Wood controls or clashes Earth. It might be a land grab.

Every pillar has a signature energy which is the interaction of the Heavenly Stem and the Earthly Branch. Within the Earthly Branch there are hidden elements that should also be considered, however, those are more readily explored in private or group study.

The image of the Wood Dragon for me is of Wood grabbing Earth and sinking down its roots. Wood has an advantage over Earth.

The relationship of the yang Wood and the yang Earth is called 七煞 Qi Sha or 7 Killings. In this case the relationship is between Wood and Earth, but any element has a Qi Sha. You can recognize it when there are clashing elements together that have the same polarity, meaning both are yin or both are yang. Qi Sha is about force and sometimes, breaking laws. When both signs are yang, the potential rewards and risks are big and out in the open. This is where we are now in 2024.

We can learn a lot about a day, a year, a month or a person by way of a single pillar. If you study Ba Zi long enough you will be able to pick out a person’s year pillar from their personality and the visual (or other) cues of age. Sometimes I watch unscripted tv just to have fun trying to guess the year pillars of the cast. For the most part, you can look up their birth information to check your work. This is a fun exercise, especially if you’re needing to rest. Rest doesn’t have to be boring.

The energy of the Wood Dragon speaks of curation, of the taking, selection or presentation of things that may not belong to you. Remember what I said about Qi Sha?

I hope you know I’m not presenting Qi Sha as morally wrong because that’s not what I think. Destruction or control is an energetic phase. It’s part of every process. It’s humans that invest it with meaning, or direct the meaning. We usually have some influence over how changes play out. We do have the capability to heal destruction but we don’t always choose it.

Curation is a natural tendency for humans because we are naturally curious. We’re always looking for patterns and we like to learn from what we find. We like to share about what we find if we think it’s good. This is probably a trait held over from hunter gatherer culture at least. Curation isn’t inherently negative.

In the past, the outcomes of curation have brought enormous benefits to students, philosophers and scholars. I think it aided survival as well. The first time that a human led another human to see a cave painting, or to their favorite berry patch, was a curation. As much as they can, caring parents curate what their children are exposed to and what they want them to learn. This is done out of seeking the advancement of your offspring, naturally. Curation has likely assisted in human evolution. How not?

Learning groups like salons were curated gatherings of smart and/or popular people who were selected to share ideas as a way of entertainment and advancement. Salons in the 21st century might include colleges and universities, summit meetings, panels of experts, very exclusive gatherings of the powerful, and expensive parties. Some curation is done in the open but I think most is not. Consider museums.

A museum is a building filled with curated objects that are deemed worthy of being collected and displayed. The curated objects are removed from their context and time, separated from their history. Once that is accomplished, they can be grouped to a curator’s liking. Their meaning may be reassigned. Museums rely on the old being made new again, by way of curation. Curators know this will attract a bigger crowd and more money.

Curation was meant for sharing but somewhere along the way it became a kind of claiming of ownership instead. Sometimes this is called appropriation. To ignore how curation harms, robs and kills cultures, lands and people would be a one sided view, wouldn’t it?

In the process of curation, a certain image is projected about the curator. A curator is a taste maker, meaning you will see their taste in what they present to you. This Wood Dragon year of 2024 is very much about curation of everything. For example, AI is a curating kind of tool, so is social media. Human Design is an example of curation too. This energy is not new or novel, it’s vibrant now.

Many of your favorite influencers are impressing you with someone else’s original content without you realizing it, but few of them will say this. It’s usually the ones that do cite sources who have the real knowledge. Most of what you might see from content creators is really an iteration of their previous work or an unattributed co-opting of others’ work. The thinking is shrinking. We seem to be in an era of accepting what is curated. The shrinking of thinking.

Curation can be used to influence you as to what is good and what is bad, what is normal and what is not. Curation involves both affirmations and negations. Curation energy can be seen in the context of buying trends, boycotts, videos, photos, music, writing, ideas and maybe most importantly, land, cultures, knowledge and information. The list is too long to be written here, but TikTok is rich with the curation phenomena should you want more examples.

In 2024, I challenge you to chase sources and source materials. Consider what human intention is behind the curation. Instead of having a pattern fed to you, find it yourself. Invest it with your own meaning and grow it. We could use something new.