Born in 1987

What 1987 carries

From the community: Diplomatic, intuitive, artistic, compassionate, cautious. May avoid conflict, be indecisive, overly sensitive, or secretive.

From the year: Cheerful and always smiling; content and happy. Gentle, caring, compassionate. Introverted, calm, steadfast, thoughtful, and fond of preserving old traditions.

The community's Plant feeds the year's Fire. This is the supported position: the Cat Spirit Guardian's instincts arrive already resourced, so a person born here tends to get further on the same effort than the community alone would predict.

The community itself is written out in full on the Cat Spirit Guardian's page — character, love, work and the communities it is bound to.

All of that is about being born in 1987. What a year does to the people living through it is a separate reading on a separate clock — and, unlike the community above, it does not move at the lunar new year. That is the Year scale of Time Analysis, one of five.

1987 with the years around it

Every year from 1975 to 1999, read against 1987. Twenty-five consecutive years contain every community at least twice and never with the same element behind it, which is the clearest demonstration of the thing these pages keep asserting: the community comes back, the reading does not.

These readings are the first of the board's four layers — the birth years alone — and it carries weight 0.30 of the result. The other three read the two charts rather than the two communities, so a strong or difficult year layer is where a reading starts, not where it lands.

The birth years 1987 is bound to

Nobody goes looking for a community. They go looking for the person born in a particular year, so the four relations worth naming are given here as the nearest year that carries each.

• 1982— the Wolf Spirit Guardian,secret friend
• 1991— the Goat Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 1983— the Elephant Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 1981— the Eagle Spirit Guardian,opposing axis
• 1988— the Dragon Spirit Guardian,harm

Frequently asked

Which Spirit Guardian rules 1987?

1987 belongs to the Cat Spirit Guardian, the community of diplomacy, with Plant as its own element. The year's element pillar is Fire (-), which is the part that changes: the community returns every twelve years but the element turns on a ten-year cycle, so 1987 reads differently from 1951 and 1963.

What element is 1987?

Fire (-) — Cheerful and always smiling; content and happy. Gentle, caring, compassionate. Introverted, calm, steadfast, thoughtful, and fond of preserving old traditions. That is the year pillar. It sits alongside the Plant the Cat Spirit Guardian carries in its own right, and the two together are what make 1987 a different reading from every other year of this community.

I was born in January 1987. Is this still my year?

Probably not. The cycle turns at Lunar New Year rather than on 1 January, so a birth in January or the first days of February usually belongs to 1986 and to the Lion Spirit Guardian. Roughly one birth in eight sits on the wrong side of that line. Add your month and day on the board and it settles the question rather than guessing.

Which birth years are most compatible with 1987?

1982 (Wolf Spirit Guardian), 1991 (Goat Spirit Guardian), 1983 (Elephant Spirit Guardian) — the secret friend first, then the trine. 1981 sits on the opposing axis. Those are branch relations only, which is the first of four layers the board reads and carries weight 0.30 of the result; the other three read the two charts rather than the two communities, so a clash here is a starting point and not a conclusion.