Li, which means fire in Chinese, also means, “how patterns in nature form random shapes, yet seem ordered in a way that we can never define.” When welook up at the sky, we don’t think, “ Oh, the clouds are so messy today,” or “The forest is so tangled and cluttered this year!“ We look at nature and think it’s perfect.

It lifts our spirits with its non-structured beauty.

The tao (order of the universe) has a certain kind of order that is neither symmetrical nor geometrical. We all recognize Li – the clouds have Li, stones have Li and the human body has Li. The interesting thing is that although we all know what it is, there is no way of objectively defining it. It is a patterning based on the order of “flow.” It is the ever present flow that is always moving through nature and creating random ordered shapes and events that seem beyond definition. Li is the sister science to Feng Shui. (more…)