Born in 2003

What 2003 carries

From the community: Gentle, artistic, compassionate, diplomatic, family-oriented. Can be indecisive, worrisome, or overly dependent.

From the year: Always calm, gentle, and tender, with an introverted nature. Careful, composed, and principled in all actions.

The community's Earth controls the year's Water. This is the pressed position: the Goat Spirit Guardian's character sets the terms and the year's element concedes them, so the traits below run stronger here than in the community's other years, with less to temper them.

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

All of that is about being born in 2003. 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.

2003 with the years around it

Every year from 1991 to 2015, read against 2003. 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 2003 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.

• 2002— the Horse Spirit Guardian,secret friend
• 1999— the Cat Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 2007— the Elephant Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 1997— the Taurus Spirit Guardian,opposing axis
• 2008— the Whale Spirit Guardian,harm

Frequently asked

Which Spirit Guardian rules 2003?

2003 belongs to the Goat Spirit Guardian, the community of nurture, with Earth as its own element. The year's element pillar is Water (-), which is the part that changes: the community returns every twelve years but the element turns on a ten-year cycle, so 2003 reads differently from 1955 and 1967.

What element is 2003?

Water (-) — Always calm, gentle, and tender, with an introverted nature. Careful, composed, and principled in all actions. That is the year pillar. It sits alongside the Earth the Goat Spirit Guardian carries in its own right, and the two together are what make 2003 a different reading from every other year of this community.

I was born in January 2003. 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 2002 and to the Horse 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 2003?

2002 (Horse Spirit Guardian), 1999 (Cat Spirit Guardian), 2007 (Elephant Spirit Guardian) — the secret friend first, then the trine. 1997 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.