It's Elemental

Tag: change

  • Workshop – Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change

    Workshop – Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change

    Unfortunately, the workshop has been cancelled.
    It will be rescheduled this Summer; keep an eye out here for the announcement!

    Form / Re-Form / In-Form / Trans-Form

    Elemental Transformation: Changing How We Work with Change

    A hands-on/minds-on workshop with Frank Chester and Seth Miller

    Saturday, March 20th
    9 am – 5 pm
    Live Oak Charter School Petaluma, CA

    Pre-registration is required.
    All workshop materials provided. Cost: $100

    This all-day workshop will combine hands-on geometry with dynamic presentations and experiential exercises designed to help you deepen your relationship with transformation.  You will leave this workshop with a physical form of your own creation and a more subtle and complex understanding of how transformation unfolds according to the archetypal patterning of the four elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. Our goal is to inspire you and enliven your own everyday transformative work.  This workshop is perfect for parents, teachers, therapists, social workers, and anyone interested in transformation. There will be a one hour period for lunch. You can bring your own lunch or drive off-site for lunch.

    Frank Chester is an artist, sculptor, geometrician, and teacher based in San Francisco.  He has been working with the four elements for over 10 years, having used them as an integral part of the research that led him to the discovery of a brand-new seven-sided form that has deep connections to the human heart. Frank travels widely, giving dynamic presentations connecting form, geometry, and spirit.

    Seth Miller has taught physics and many other subjects in Waldorf schools across the West.  With a Master’s degree in consciousness studies, he is passionate about bringing forth tools for transformation; his specialty is the alchemy of the four elements. He is currently developing this work in a PhD dissertation, which weaves together alchemy, cybernetic epistemology, Goethean phenomenology, and anthroposophy.

  • Chaos theory and fractals: 2/4

    Chaos theory and fractals: 2/4

    2. Does the fractal model also work for dynamic, fluid or changing shapes?

    Yes, in fact this is it’s most ‘natural home’ I think.  The reason is that fractals are about processes, not things, and processes are just that: descriptions of changes, not of things, and changes have a way of, well, being DIFFERENT the next time you look at them.  So there are ‘orders’ or ‘levels’ of change, described by the number of levels of description required to get to the point where the pattern is invariant.

    Your blood is constantly changing (systole, diastole), at this level of description there is no constant, because your blood pressure is constantly changing (lucky for us, or we’d be dead!).  But at a higher level of description you get a pattern (high pressure, then lower pressure), that is invariant. You don’t get a systole and then another systole, or a succession of diastoles; they alternate.  But this alternation is not constant either!  The extent of the systole/diastole is ALSO constantly varying (also lucky for us, because this change, linked to what is known as ‘heart rate variability’, is strongly correlated with heart health), so it requires ANOTHER level of description to see how that is changing… and so on.  At each level something ‘stays the same’ while other things ‘constantly change’.  When we talk about change and constancy we have to be careful because we can never fully isolate one from the other; they are completely intertwined ‘all the way up and all the way down’.