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Pay Attention!
The Newsletter of Creative Visions Feng Shui
Vol 3 No. 1
Not New Year's Yet!

While we might party it up and make lists of resolutions come January 1st, you won't find much of that here.  That's because the Chinese won't be celebrating the New Year until Feb 14. In the Rogue Valley, the place to be is Jacksonville and the date is February 13.

And celebrate it they do!  Remember, it was the Chinese who invented gun powder and fireworks!
 
I recall being in Manhattans' Chinatown one New Years.  With skyscrapers on both sides of the street, it sounded like the city was engaged in a massive gun battle.  Millions of tiny pieces of cracker wrapping floated down while we walked on 1-2 inches of used wrappers lining the sidewalks and the street.  It was a sight and sound never to be forgotten!
THE SEASON OF GIVING

Remember the movie "Play It Forward"? People did a good deed for another and afterwards found the Universe gifting them in an even greater amount.  I invite you to think of someone you know who might be able to use Feng Shui in their Home or their Business.
Just click this and a complimentary copy will be sent. I do not know who gets what, nor do I keep any information about my subscribers. And should they like what they find, they can use the button below to subscribe. So go ahead, Play It Forward and see what happens.

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Greetings!

You may notice a certain chilliness to this issue: I've chosen cold colors as background to coincide with my editorial.  The more I understand how profound is our relationship to Nature, the more I understand how Feng Shui can help guide us.  It has so much to teach and yet it's very simple.  Why are people still studying this ancient art and science?  Because it is profound in its subtleties.  And we folk here in the West can miss that so easily. So sit down, get warm, have a cup of tea and consider the following ideas.
 
Sincerely,
Sugeet
Creative Visions Feng Shui
Pay Attention!

       Allan Watts used to say that the trouble with English was that it could only describe parts of things and not the thing as a whole.  He used the illustration of a cat passing behind a picket fence.  Each space between the pickets was part of the description, and each was limited by what you could see - part of the head, then part of the neck and so on.  
       He contrasted this to the Chinese written system, which is made up of ideograms, or symbolic pictures of objects and concepts.  Thus, the symbol for a cat could be rendered in such a way that the reader understood that it was a grey tabby, kind of old, moving slowly, a myriad of characteristics.  It was in this way that Watts showed how we in the West have an incomplete understanding of the world as we communicate and think in a linear way (one letter follows another) while the Chinese use ideograms to communicate the whole.

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        "Alphabetic writing is a representation of sound, whereas the ideogram represents vision and, furthermore, represents the world directly-not being a sign for a sound which is the name of a thing. As for names, the sound "bird" has nothing in it that reminds one of a bird, and for some reason it would strike us a childish to substitute more direct names, such as tweetie, powee, or quark." Alan Watts, Tao, the Watercourse Way, 1975, p14.
        The natural world is not a linear system.  There are an infinite number of variables that interact constantly.  Indeed, we know that the only constant is change.  So to accurately describe one moment with all it's variables would take ages in our linear, alphabetic language.
       As we approach the New Year (the Chinese New Year will not be here until February 14) rather than making resolutions, I invite you to decide to approach the world differently -  pay attention to the natural world, for it is in that natural world that you will start to see great wisdom.  Once this process starts, the Chinese way of approaching how the part fits into the whole makes a lot more sense than our Western concept of breaking things down trying to gain control.  Indeed, as we in the West try to gain absolute control over the natural world, we end up trying to take more and more control through creating more and more devices which purport to give us more control. We finally become slaves to the devices of our own making, and still we cannot control even a small part of our world.
       Take a look at the areas in you business that don't seem to be working and try and observe what is blocking the energy from flowing smoothly in that physical space.  At home, look around your yard.  Where do things not grow? What areas are used often by your animals and where do they Not Go?  Inside, what room do you tend Not to Use?  Where do things gather (clutter magnets)?
       Instead of trying to fix something quickly, take the time to pay attention and observe how the world operates in aBoy w head in sandny location you observe.  Don't be in a hurry. Once you have a pretty good idea of what's not being used or is out of control, what can you do to make it more harmonious?  Of course, that's what I do for a living, but there's a lot you can do before you need my services.  And if whatever you do does not give you the results you hoped for, then we do need to talk.  Hopefully, you will start to see that Feng Shui is not some mysterious or magical thing - it is very practical and based on considered observation of our natural world. 
       I think much of our problems today come from the fact that we (and I mean here our culture) keep attempting to remove our focus from the natural world and direct it to man made things. What is the latest incarnation of this?  Back seat DVD screens in cars!  People think they are buying distraction and quiet, but they are really demonstrating to their children that the man-made, the artificial, is more desirable than the natural.  And that, my friends, is a symptom of a real sickness.

Have you visited the Archive yet?

Were you aware that each and every past issue to this newsletter is available to you whenever you want?  You can go back to topics that you may have wanted to explore bu no had the time, or are looking for hints and tricks for your special project.

 Well, just click here and you'll be taken to the archive.  Have fun browsing!
 
A Wealth of Services awaits you

The Creative Visions web site is chocablock full of information and examples of what can happen when you use Feng Shui.  Explore the many varied services Creative Visions offers. Check out the Testimonials, or any other part of either the site or the blog.  Explore, look around, enjoy.  It's all there just for you 24/7!