Water and Wood
Water generates Wood, seen from the Water side. This is the most productive of the four relations and the one the tradition treats as unambiguously good: the supply goes out and something grows because of it.
Water generates Wood · water is what makes wood grow
At a glance
Water generates Wood: a supply that goes out before it is asked for, and a source that can run dry unnoticed.
Water generates Wood.
What Water does to Wood
A chart in this position is the source. The reading is about whether the giving is chosen or automatic: Water supplies Wood because that is what the cycle does, not because anyone decided to, and a chart that gives without deciding eventually gives without noticing. That is the difference between generosity and depletion.
The practical experience is being the person other people grow on. Water-Wood charts tend to end up in supporting roles — teaching, funding, raising, enabling — and the phase's difficulty is that it does not ask for anything back, because asking would interrupt the flow. The classical correction is Metal behind the Water, which in practice means a source of one's own.
In a chart, and in a person
In a chart
Favourable in almost all configurations, since Wood is rarely harmed by supply. The exception is a chart so wet that the Wood is waterlogged, which reads as stagnation rather than growth.
In a person
You are the one being drawn on. It works while the supply is renewable and fails when it is not — and the failure is silent, because the phase does not register its own depletion until it is complete.
The relation in brief
Water generates Wood
water is what makes wood grow
winter, north, black
spring, east, blue-green
How much weight this carries
Water feeding Wood is the most comfortable of the four relations and the one most likely to be overdone. A chart that gives continuously with nothing feeding it back reads as generous and then, years later, as exhausted. The relation describes a flow, not an obligation.
Related Concepts
Common questions
Is Water feeding Wood always good?
It is the most benign of the four relations. It becomes a problem only when the Water has no source of its own.
Why do people in this position burn out quietly?
Because the giving is automatic rather than chosen, so nothing triggers a check. The correction is a supply of one's own, not less generosity.
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