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Community & Groups
Community Bridge
Scott was one of two "Founding Fathers" of The Community. The Community began in roughly 1991 when Scott organized many intentional community-building events. The Community provided the primary "soil and seed" for the communities of Life-As-Art, Arete, Rhythm Society and Authentic SF/World. These collective communities consist of over a thousand people in the Bay Area who are interconnected by email lists, intentional gatherings, courses and other events and networks. The Community pre-dated email and many of the other communities pre-dated online networks such as Facebook.
Fractal Salon Groups
Fractal Salons take place about once a month in my living room ("Salon" is the French word for "living room") couches and comfortable chairs. Salons are a place to experience the best of three different groups: book club/classroom, group counseling and a dinner party. Salons are designed to bridge together academic, emotional and social intelligence. Salons are not as heady or conceptual as a classroom, not as emotionally deep as group counseling, and have more of a focused topic than most dinner parties. The topic range from our conception of home, our individual stories, our goals and aspirations, the creative process, the nature of relationships and the meaning of life. I ask that as the group proceeds we strive to stay more and more in the moment in our communications with each other.
As we collectively strive to stay present, the group conversation follows a unique path, a kind of “group story” unfolds, that will usually bring us to a point of relatedness and connectedness with each other, appreciation and gratefulness for each other and our lives, and the experience of awe and wonder. The experience of traveling along a (Fractal) path together is usually deeply moving and rewarding.
Harvard Graduate School of Education Salon Gathering
Brooklyn Salon
Fractal Bridge Screenplay
Fractals lend themselves to the visual arts and so film is an ideal medium for expressing them. The Fractal Bridge is a screenplay that demonstrates Fractals through the multi-dimensionality of a group of educators in dialogue with each other (much like those that occur at the Fractal Salons).
The Fractal Bridge is a film with many similarities to Kapra's Mindwalk (1991), Malle’s Dinner With Andre (1981), Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1993), Linklater's Waking Life (2002), and the Academy Award for Best Screenplay in 2004--Alexander Payne's Sideways.
Mindwalk is a beautiful film based on Fritjof Kapra's Turning Point, a philosophy about solving some of the world's many problems through a "Systems Theory" approach. The three main characters in Mindwalk meet on the mysterious Medieval city of Mont St. Michel in Normandy. A female PhD Nuclear Scientist, an award-winning poet, and an ex-Democratic Presidential candidate slowly wander through the city while conversing on system theory topics and weaving together a variety of subjects related to issues such as sustainability, nuclear war, effective democracy, sub-atomic physics, the beauty of poetry and literature, andthe meaning of other related aspects of life.
Fractal Bridge is a screenplay and soon to be a film about a memorable and legendary salon-like gathering of several educators who have an extraordinary discussion that alters their perspectives and lives forever. Each of them has a unique area of expertise: Math, Science, Astronomy, Philosophy, History, Literature, Languages and Spirituality. To the flicker of candles they forge a discussion about creativity, the arts, the nature of relationship and the meaning of life.
Their discussion at first reveals what seems to be their fundamental differences in perspective. But after some time they loosen the grip that their disciplines have on their conversation style, and they soon discover that behind their differing positions is a unifying and often beautiful principle, essence and understanding that they all share. They settle into the moment with each other, share more deeply about their own personal lives, and find that they are speaking about different aspect of the same phenomenon (feeling different parts of the same elephant). That unifying principle, they agree, is best expressed as the metaphor of a Fractal and Interconnectedness.
On this life-altering night their seemingly separate worlds are brought together as if they were traveling together on a very special bridge--"The Fractal Bridge!"
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