Born in 2023

What 2023 carries

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

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

The year's Water feeds the community's Plant. The generosity runs outward — this birth year spends itself on what the Cat Spirit Guardian is trying to build, which is productive and quietly costly, and it is the combination most likely to need a rest it does not ask for.

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 2023. 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.

2023 with the years around it

Every year from 2011 to 2035, read against 2023. 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 2023 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.

• 2018— the Wolf Spirit Guardian,secret friend
• 2027— the Goat Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 2019— the Elephant Spirit Guardian,three-harmony
• 2017— the Eagle Spirit Guardian,opposing axis
• 2024— the Dragon Spirit Guardian,harm

The other Water (-) year in the Cat Spirit Guardian's cycle

A community turning every twelve years against an element turning every ten means a signature repeats every sixty. 2023 and 1963 are the two years in this catalogue that share one: the same Cat Spirit Guardian, the same Water (-) behind it. What separates them is everything they are read against — the people either year is likely to be seated beside were born sixty years apart.

Frequently asked

Which Spirit Guardian rules 2023?

2023 belongs to the Cat Spirit Guardian, the community of diplomacy, with Plant 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 2023 reads differently from 1951 and 1963.

What element is 2023?

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 Plant the Cat Spirit Guardian carries in its own right, and the two together are what make 2023 a different reading from every other year of this community.

I was born in January 2023. 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 2022 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 2023?

2018 (Wolf Spirit Guardian), 2027 (Goat Spirit Guardian), 2019 (Elephant Spirit Guardian) — the secret friend first, then the trine. 2017 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.