Yi Wood is the second of the ten Heavenly Stems in Chinese style fortune telling. What are the Heavenly Stems and what do they show us? They don’t give any information about life or our circumstances—instead, they show us our ideas. Yi Wood is the second archetype in Chinese cosmology. It is the connector and artist. If you want to check to see if Yi Wood represents your personality in Chinese astrology, find a bazi chart calculator and look for your day stem. Your day stem is the anchor of your day and represents your personality.

(I titled this article “day master” because the day stem of your chart is often translated as “day master” and this is the most common search term related to the concept. However, you can call your day stem your day destiny, your chart ruler, or simply your day stem.)

Yi Wood/乙木 is grass. It is wood just like Jia Wood but it’s the yin version of wood. Jia Wood is the yang version of wood. Each of the five movements have a yin and yang version. Yi Wood is flexible wood which you can see in its name. 乙 means flexible and literally shows a fiber or vine twisting and turning. That’s why Yi Wood is grass. Grass is a form of wood that can bend.

I don’t think people usually think about how unruly grass is. We tend to describe Yi Wood in nice words. You’re a flower! You’re a beautiful vine! Well, guess what? Vines are parasites that grow on trees or walls and they cut up their host with their roots. A flower isn’t a real plant. A flower is just the genitals of any plant. Yi Wood is grass—it’s a vine or a weed.

Try to make grass grow in a tamed and rectangular shape. You can’t. The only way you can make grass grow a certain way is if you spend time every single day pruning it. That’s why lawns are such symbols of domesticated nature and social control. They take a lot of labor to maintain. Grass is the most unruly form of life. You have to cut it every day to keep it from spreading out and mixing.

Yi Wood is unruly. Yi Wood will grow. You can’t tell Yi Wood people what to do. They’re like weeds that seem to make it a priority to surprise you. They are people who can only be motivated by reverse psychology. Even if they planned to do something, if they are asked to do it, they will pretend to change their mind.

So, Yi Wood is flexible—yes. They’re sometimes described as “soft” because they are flexible. But are they soft as in pliant? No. Yi Wood is yin on the outside but they are still yang because wood itself is yang. Yi Wood people have their own plan. They make their plans with a flexible mindset but only because they plan to change their plan as soon as someone tells them that they have a really good plan and that they should be following it.

Amy Winehouse was a Yi Wood day stem person. So is Rihanna. These are not pliant people. These are people with flexible plans who change their minds according to the situation. These are not obedient women. Yi Wood tends to be the most successful day stem for the same reasons why grass is such a successful life form.

I think we get a better sense of grass’s character when we consider bamboo. Bamboo is a type of grass but it’s large enough to really make us as humans work around it.

A bamboo forest is actually all clones of one bamboo plant. Bamboo plants grow like crazy! They can grow several inches in a single day. Sometimes, bamboo actually grows so fast you can see them get longer with your naked eye. As bamboo grows, it tears up all of the hard soil or stone around itself. Bamboo, just like all grass, has tiny roots that slice objects up like small knives. The roots of grass can slice through even metal. Bamboo usually grows on mountains so it digs into hard rock. You can’t kill bamboo. You can try to control it by spending all of your time digging up the shoots but it’s very, very hard. There’s only one way to get rid of bamboo—wait it out.

Every 120 years, bamboo masts. The original bamboo plant that cloned itself into a whole forest flowers and, when it does, the entire forest flowers and dies. That’s why chickens and bamboo go hand in hand and why chickens are so fertile, laying eggs every single day. Chickens are used to living in bamboo forests where they receive an abundance of feed when the whole forest flowers and dies.

Yi Wood people have their own schedule. They take their own direction. A vine can grow in any direction even more than a tree. Grass can make their roots anywhere. They don’t need a solid ground. They can attach to almost any type of surface. When Yi Wood finds a place where their ideas can grow, they tend to replicate one idea again and again just like grass. Ruth Handler, the inventor of the Barbie doll, was a Yi Wood day stem person. Barbie dolls are a bit like bamboo or grass—they’re all clones of each other.

Yi Wood is the most resilient archetype in Chinese cosmology. Even when a storm comes, a bamboo forest does not suffer for the same reason a field of grass isn’t afraid of the wind and rain. Yi Wood is flexible so it doesn’t break during times of great change. There’s a Barbie for every season, for every era.

People with Yi Wood day stems are flexible ideologically. They are thinkers but they are not dogmatic. All yin stems tend to be more resilient than yang stems—while Jia Wood likes to make a school of thought and stick to that school, Yi Wood is bridging different ideas together and replicating already existing ideas. They attach themselves to an already existing school of thought and present themselves as a follower. A powerful follower depending on the strength of the wood in the chart.

If Jia Wood is usually seen as big brother, Yi Wood is seen as second in command. If you were to attack an idea that you disagree with, who do you think you would go after? The teacher/leader or the humble follower?

The leader usually appears to have more power but the follower chooses the leader. Behind every emperor is an eunuch pulling the strings and Yi Wood, being flexible wood, is literally string. When the emperor dies, the eunuch sometimes even does some actions to choose the next emperor.

Yi Wood is string. It is literally fiber. That’s why Yi Wood people have the reputation of being artists or designers. Grass is a very artistic form of life—it can be stringy, mossy, flowers, spikey, or even fuzzy. Isamu Noguchi was a Yi Wood day stem person and he worked across many mediums. String is also what we use to bind things together.

Yi Wood is well connected and well attached. They tend to know a lot of people from different walks of life. They’ll show up to a spiritual space and do some ego devouring exercise but then show up to a Marxist meeting the next day and agree that all spirituality is anti-science. It doesn’t matter what environment they put themselves in. They will find a way to grow intellectually no matter where they are.

And just like string, Yi Wood people bring people together. They’re not obvious with their ideas so they don’t really have the effect of dividing people ideologically. They’re subtle. They’re flexible. They ask more questions than they give answers. As long as Yi Wood is connected to something, they can endure through any season. They can survive an ideological storm or a time of great social transition. They’re not loud teachers—they just connect.