I was around twenty when I bought a small candle lamp from a Christmas market in Heidelberg.

When the candle was lit, the flame created a subtle breeze, and that breeze set tiny reindeers spinning above.
I remember staring at it for a long time.
It was a precious moment—my mind emptied, completely.

It was just the two of us, the flame and me, quietly illuminating each other.
Time seemed to vanish, the moment became translucent, suspended, immaculate.

Years later, when I looked again at a photo of that moment, I felt an unexpected urge to cry.

I realized then: that was delicate yin fire (丁火) in winter—wrapped in the etched metal of Xīnjīn (辛金), flickering alone in the coldest night.

That image—was me.
That was the elemental symbol of my life.

At first, I believed these Bāzì (八字) images—life elements drawn from birth data—were just a private language.
I made it my own romantic system of symbols, ritualized fantasies kept in a hidden corner, a secret code generating images of different souls.

But these symbols have a strange way of returning.
They seem reflections of single moments, yet they stumble through time and resurface repeatedly, as if something primal is insisting upon itself.

They don’t just describe us.
They echo through us.

I once read how Carl Jung described his relationship with the self.
Then, curious, I calculated his Bāzì chart:
He was born with Yǐ Hài, Guǐ Wèi, Jǐ Chǒu, Jiǎ Xū (乙亥 癸未 己丑 甲戌)—
creating an image of mid-summer earth, with three collision-prone branches (Chǒu, Wèi, Xū), a landscape of compression, dryness, and internal strife.

He wrote:

“I did not expect that my self would be a desert, a dry, hot desert, full of dust and without water.
Why is my self a desert?
Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events?
Why did I avoid my self?
Was I not dear to myself?
But I have avoided the place of my soul.”

In that passage, Jung touches something essential.
His desert is not exactly his Bāzì image. Because there are also plenty of water and wood among his pillars —a balanced yet powerful earthscape. And yet he wondered:

“Should I also make a garden out of the desert?
Should I people a desolate land?
Should I open the airy magic garden of the wilderness?”

This matching always strikes my heart. Among philosophers, many use forests to symbolize the soul. Nietzsche’s six characters( without the hour pillar): Jiǎ Chén, Jiǎ Xū, Wù Chén (甲辰 甲戌 戊辰), formed an image consisting solely of trees and mountains. He once wrote:

“But it is the same with man as with the tree.The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep—into the evil.”

And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he says:

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees. but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”

Some souls are forests.
Others are rivers.
Some are lanterns suspended in frozen air.
And each tries name its own shape.

The soul has its own world. A world written not in definitions, but in flowing symbols. Each symbol here holds a singular meaning—difficult to interpret yet unmistakably real.

Jung said: only the true self can enter this space. Or rather, only one who has entirely become their own self—who lives neither in society, nor in the opinions of others, nor even in ideas—can enter.

I think, for those who sincerely long for this kind of selfhood—
the world may still wink at them.
Brief flashes of synchronicity break through the veil.
Glimmers of the code flicker in the margins.

From a philosophical and healing perspective, I take these elemental images of birth chart seriously.

Ancient divine worlds lived entirely through cultural symbols.
So does Eastern thought.
Our task now is to bring those symbols into conversation with modern civilization.