Let’s see, we’re into day… oh, it doesn’t matter now, I lost count! But we’re almost done! We’re still sharing Brian’s shower, but the kitchen is up and running and we have plumbing in our bathroom. We have the TVs all hooked up, although we’re missing one of the remotes. As soon as we get the big bathtub out of the garage I think I can get my car in there! And speaking of the kitchen… I bought all new Kitchenaid appliances – very nice, top of the line. The microwave is fine, the oven is fine (although it won’t broil with the door open which bugs me). But the trash compactor came making a thumping noise. The freezer door is frosting over near the ice maker. And the dishwasher door won’t latch closed. So 3 of the 5 appliance I bought had problems! Kitchenaid sent a repairman. He fixed the trash compactor, but said we have to wait for a new door for the freezer, and we have to order a new latch for the dishwasher. I asked the repairman if he had seen this kind of thing before, and he said that Kitchenaid was always really good, very reputable, until Whirlpool bought them out. Hmmm…. I didn’t know that! I thought Whirlpool was good – didn’t they buy out Maytag? I can’t keep track of all this corporate stuff. Anyhow – my kitchen it getting fixed, and when it is I’ll be happy. But for now I’m frustrated. It’s not like this stuff was cheap. Right now I feel like the tile guys are living with us. They’re pleasant enough – but it would be nice to have the house to ourselves. They’re down to just our shower, and it’s a big job. My cat still hasn’t recovered. Cats are notoriously bad with change, and my cat, having lived in the same house for all of her life and never going far from my bedroom, is quite the prima donna. It’s going to take some time for her to get used to this place. We’ve been here 2 weeks now… I don’t know how long it’s going to take – she’s pretty much just hiding in the laundry room or my closet. And I discovered ebay! Well, I knew all about ebay, but now I have actually gone on there and bought stuff – and it is very cool. I bought some rugs from Persian Village – the prices are amazing! Actually, I have to go check on one of my bids now. More later!

An Excerpt from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss

Whatever you think or feel, the universe says yes. Perhaps you have noticed this. Yes, we are talking about the law of attraction. It is indeed an ancient law, never a secret to those who live consciously. “All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other’s power,” according to the medieval magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It is a rule of reality that we attract or repel different things according to the emotions, the attitudes, the feelings, the agendas that we carry.

Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you. If you go about your day filled with doom and gloom, the world will give you plenty of reasons to support that attitude. You’ll start looking like that cartoon character who goes about with a personal black cloud over his head that rains only on his parade. Conversely, if your attitude is bright and open to happy surprises, you may be rewarded by a bright day, even when the sky is leaden overhead, and by surprisingly happy encounters.

Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events, and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody. This process begins before we speak or act because thoughts and feelings are already actions and our attitudes are out there ahead of us. This requires us to do a regular attitude check, asking, What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?

It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field. If you go around carrying a repertoire of doom and gloom, you may not say what’s on your mind, but the universe will hear you and support you. Attitude adjustment requires more than reciting the kind of New Age affirmation you see in cute boxes with flowers and sunsets on Facebook. It requires deeper self-examination and self-mobilization.

What are you doing? A woman in one of my workshops told me she hears this question, put by an inner voice, many times a day. Sometimes it rattles her and saps her confidence. But she is grateful for the inner questioner that provokes her to look at herself. It’s a question worth putting to yourself any day. As you do that, remember that thinking and feeling are also doing.

“The passions of the soul work magic.” I borrowed that from a medieval alchemist also beloved by Jung. It conveys something fundamental about our experience of how things manifest in the world around us. High emotions, high passions generate results. When raw energy is loose, it has effects in the world. It can blow things up or bring them together. There is an art in learning to operate when your passions are riding high and to recognize that is a moment when you can make magic. Even when you are in the throes of what people would call negative emotions — rage, anger, pain, grief, even fear — if you can take the force of such emotions and choose to harness and direct them in a certain creative or healing way, you can work wonders, and you can change the world around you.

How? Because there is no impermeable barrier between mind and matter. Jung and Pauli in concert, the great psychologist and the great physicist, came around to the idea that the old medieval phrase applies: unus mundus, “one world.” Psyche and physis, mind and matter, are one reality. They interweave at every level of the universe. They are not separate. As Pauli wrote, “Mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality.” I think this is fundamental truth, and it becomes part of fundamental life operation when you wake up to it.

The stronger our emotions, the stronger their effects on our psychic and physical environment. And the effects of our emotions may reach much further than we can initially understand. They can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

When we think or feel strongly about another person, we will touch that person and affect his or her mind and body — even across great distances — unless that person has found a way to block that transmission. The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote that “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

Bring in the creative imagination, and it is wonderful how the world can rearrange itself. I heard a beautiful little story about this from a friend in California. She had been consciously building a kind of inner sanctuary, a place of peace and joy where she could take herself anytime in her imagination. She envisioned a lovely place with healing waters, around an oak tree she knows in the natural world. In imagination, she added a swing to the tree, visualizing the ropes fastened to one of its great limbs. She pictured herself rocking happily under the spreading canopy of the oak. She used this image to help her get through a long and sleepless night when she was severely ill.

A week later, feeling much restored, she took a hike to the place of the oak. And found that someone had added a swing, exactly where she had placed it in her imagination.

Scientific experiments have shown the ability of the human mind and emotions to change physical matter: studies by Masaru Emoto have shown that human emotions can change the nature and composition of water, and the Findhorn experiments have taught us that good thoughts positively affect the growth of plants. Conversely, rage or grief can produce disturbing and sometimes terrifying effects in the physical environment.

“We are magnets in an iron globe,” declared Emerson. If we are upbeat and positive, “we have keys to all doors….The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” Conversely, “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst …dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”

Whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude, and that this can change everything.

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Excerpted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life ©2015 by Robert Moss. Printed with permission of New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com

Robert Moss is the author of Sidewalk Oracles and numerous other books about dreaming, shamanism, and imagination. He is a novelist, poet, and independent scholar, and the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. He leads creative and shamanic adventures all over the world and leads popular online courses in Active Dreaming for The Shift Network. His website is www.mossdreams.com

Official Press Release from the Director’s Guild of America:

Los Angeles – Directors Guild of America President Paris Barclay today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2013.

“To be chosen by your peers in a year full of incredibly well-crafted films is the true marker of outstanding directorial achievement,” said Barclay. “The passion and vision of each of the nominees resulted in tremendously diverse films that kept audiences mesmerized. Congratulations to each of the nominees on a job very well done.”

The winner will be named at the 66th Annual DGA Awards Dinner on Saturday, January 25, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The nominees are (in alphabetical order):

ALFONSO CUAR�N
Gravity
(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Mr. Cuar�n’s Directorial Team:
� Unit Production Manager: David Siegel (Arizona Unit)
� First Assistant Directors: Josh Robertson, Stephen Hagen (Arizona Unit)
� Second Assistant Director: Ben Howard

This is Mr. Cuar�n’s first DGA Award nomination.

PAUL GREENGRASS
Captain Phillips
(Columbia Pictures)

Mr. Greengrass’s Directorial Team:
� Unit Production Managers: Todd Lewis, Gregory Goodman
� First Assistant Director: Chris Carreras
� Second Assistant Directors: Nick Shuttleworth, Mark S. Constance

This is Mr. Greengrass’s first DGA Award nomination.

STEVE McQUEEN
12 Years A Slave
(Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Mr. McQueen’s Directorial Team:
� Unit Production Manager: Anthony Katagas
� First Assistant Director: Doug Torres
� Second Assistant Director: James Roque Jr.
� Second Second Assistant Director: Sherman Shelton Jr.
� Additional Second Assistant Director: Nathan Parker

This is Mr. McQueen’s first DGA Award nomination.

DAVID O. RUSSELL
American Hustle
(Columbia Pictures)

Mr. Russell’s Directorial Team:
� Unit Production Managers: Shea Kammer, Mark Kamine
� First Assistant Director: Michele ‘Shelley’ Ziegler
� Second Assistant Director: Xanthus Valan
� Second Second Assistant Director: Jason Fesel
� Location Managers: David Velasco, Guy Efrat (New York Unit)

This is Mr. Russell’s second DGA Award nomination. He was previously nominated in this category for The Fighter in 2010.

MARTIN SCORSESE
The Wolf of Wall Street
(Paramount Pictures)

Mr. Scorsese’s Directorial Team:
� Unit Production Manager: Richard Baratta
� First Assistant Director: Adam Somner
� Second Assistant Director: Francisco Oritz
� Second Second Assistant Director: Jeremy Marks
� Additional Second Assistant Director: Scott Koche
� Location Manager: Nils Widboom

This is Mr. Scorsese’s eleventh DGA Award nomination. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film in 2006 for The Departed, and has also been nominated in that category for Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). Mr. Scorsese also won the DGA Award in 2010 for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Television for Boardwalk Empire and he was nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for George Harrison: Living in the Material World in 2011. In 1999, Mr. Scorsese was presented with the Filmmaker Award at the inaugural DGA Honors Gala, and he was honored with the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

***

The winner in the Feature Film category will be announced at the 66th Annual DGA Awards dinner and ceremony on Saturday evening, January 25, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza. The DGA Awards will be hosted by actor Jane Lynch.

DGA nominations for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Television and Commercials will be announced on January 9, 2014. DGA nominations for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentaries will be announced on January 13, 2014. BMW is the Exclusive Automotive Sponsor of the 66th Annual DGA Awards.