school of the small and imperfect

School of the Small and Imperfect is an ongoing, online gathering space co-created with Alex Walker wherein we practice bringing our attention to the room and staying with what arises. It’s not a school with curriculum and teachers but a school of fish, a living ecology for attending our relational edges together.

what is it?

School of the Small and Imperfect is a living, breathing, emergent space for the messy, mysterious, everyday practice of being with what is actually here.

We meet in an ongoing way to practice presence, attention, relational responsiveness, and the art of not knowing. We come to sit with discomfort, to stay with complexity, and to practice the courage it takes to respond to what is arising - instead of reacting to the fear, urgency, and distraction that dominate our current culture. We create a field of attention that makes something new possible.

This a weekly membership space in which we practice showing up. We consciously sit in the uncomfortable, unresolved places and tend the edges of the unknown. We let ourselves be led into new terrain.

We appreciate the part that each person brings forth is mirroring something for the whole. This appreciation supports us to build community, take risks, trust life, and realize our own wholeness.

When we step out of habituated ways of relating and into the present moment, the discoveries we make allow us to bring more freedom, energy, and creativity into our lives and communities.

This school of fish offers opportunities to:

  • Take relational risks and try on new ways of being outside the paradigm of good/bad, right/wrong

  • Reclaim our attention from transaction, consumption, and distraction

  • Practice working with what is alive and emergent

  • Create structures of mutual support

  • Resource our ability to show up in our communities

  • Stop assessing our impact by the size of the gesture

  • Show up even when it’s hard or confusing

  • Let go of specialness and lean into the ordinary

  • Make personhood about relationality not ideology

  • Play with preconceptions around identity and emotionality

  • Trust life, trust other people, trust ourselves with other people

who are we?

We are Laura Geiger and Alex Walker: facilitators, artists, and relational practitioners drawn together by a shared devotion to the edges of aliveness, the complex, mysterious, and emergent.

Our collaboration is rooted in a mutual inquiry: What becomes possible when we stay with what arises?

Laura brings over two decades of experience in movement, somatics, therapeutic performance, and symbolic practice. She is the creator of Deep Puppetry, a modality that explores animacy, abjection, and anti-oppression. Her work is informed by social therapeutics, ritual arts, relational ecologies, mysticism, Theatre of the Oppressed, and the sacred imperfect.

Alex is a writer, artist, and mentor whose work bridges spirit, ecology, and the wyrd. With a background in nature art, ecological therapy, and energy healing, Alex brings a deep sensitivity to the margins of what is human and more-than-human. Their practice is shaped by neurodiversity, embodiment, and a commitment to dismantling systems of oppression through relational presence and creative exploration. (unspeakablearts.org)

Together, we offer this living, breathing space for collective practice. Here, we orient toward being with what is. We welcome awkwardness, contradiction, silence, silliness, and surprise.

Our intention is not to create a perfect model or a right way. Our intention is to show up in our complexity, wholeness, smallness, and imperfection. We invite you to do the same.

school of the small and imperfect is for people who care, people who are or long to be activists, deep-feelers, oddballs, radicals, and changemakers

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 Laura 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, and more, we 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.

watch to find out more

when do we meet?

Tuesdays, 2pm-3:30pm Central European Time
(one spot currently open)

Wednesday, 6pm-7:30pm Central European Time
(beginning in August)

School of the Small and Imperfect operates on a sliding scale, month-to-month membership model. Fish who join the school do so with the intention of staying long-term and contributing to the development of the group.

interested? let’s talk!