Calling people who care, people who are or long to be activists, deep-feelers, oddballs, radicals, or changemakers:

Let’s get smaller and less perfect. Let’s get ordinary.

We are in an unprecedented position. We have access to information, images, activities and stories from across the entire planet in real time.

In our desire to help, fix, accompany, fight, and exact justice, we march, boycott, lobby, repost the perspectives that need amplifying, and try to convince people to care about what we care about. 

Our attention is on the planetary perspective. 

The thing is, we aren’t meant to see constant images of events we cannot directly affect, nor witness terrors unfolding in far away places. We aren’t meant to see this much; we aren’t built to endure it. 

In dedicating ourselves to the planetary perspective and the attempt to be on the right side of every complexity, we lose our agency. We lose the opportunity to connect and affect practical change right where we are. Anxiety and overwhelm set in. Despair and depression often ensue. Loneliness and stuckness are rampant. We don’t make things anymore. We feel lost. We forget what it is to be present, wild, and imperfect.

We have convinced ourselves that how far we can reach is more important than what we can hold.

The suggestion is not to stop taking global action. Instead, the question becomes: what am I missing here in order to locate attention there?

What are we sacrificing from our daily experience of living when our focus is on things far from home?

We need spaces where we can be humans, rather than representatives of an ideology or a demographic, with other humans who want that, too. We need to steer ourselves back to where we are, what we have, and what we can change, even if it’s not sexy, important or externally validating. 

Alex and I have created such a place.  An invitation to an ecology of connection, a school of fish. A place where your presence is your offering. 

School of the Small and Imperfect is an ongoing group that meets weekly to reengage with what is emergent, to flex the muscle of responding to what arises. This school declares that who you are, where you are, what you make, and what we make together matters. This, too, is activism. Your own relational development is also your work on the planet.  We cannot make the impact we desire if we aren’t (at)tending to the small and imperfect that is right in front of us. 

Through conversation, creative and spiritual activity, relational practice, land connection, placemaking, and more, we will explore new questions and new directions. It’s valuing the building of community, taking risks, and supporting each other. It’s being aware and intentional with our attention. It’s remembering and feeding humble interests, creativity for its own sake, curiosity, enthusiasm, and wonder. 

Inspired by social therapeutics and integrative community therapy, School for the Small and Imperfect is designed as an alternative to traditional psychology and therapeutic models. Our group is not a one-time meeting but a place to practice becoming, belonging and showing up. 

You bring what you have to offer, and that is plenty.

This school is for you if you have felt a longing to deepen into the sweetness of mutuality and reciprocity, of care and community. Let’s increase our capacity for being with our joys and sorrows, listening and allowing life to move us forward as we swim its currents together. 

Forget big and important; it’s time for small and imperfect.