About imPEARma
Offering Fruit to Impermanence.
At imPEARma, we believe that what something is now is not necessarily what it will always be.
For us, impermanence does not simply mean that stable things eventually change.
It is a way of noticing that something can be real and meaningful now without being the final form, meaning, or conclusion.
A moment may feel fortunate, painful, unfinished, ordinary, or conclusive.
Later, something else may become visible, and the meaning may move again.
imPEARma is not interested in replacing one fixed interpretation with another.
We hope to create a little room for meanings and possibilities to remain open.
The offering, the clearing, and the fruit.
One way we think about the work is this:
An activity can be a vessel.
An offering may open a clearing.
The fruit might be whatever becomes possible there.
Perhaps it is a different way of seeing.
A sacred pause.
Permission to change direction.
Momentum to meet an ordinary experience with more attention.
A realization that the apparent task, destination, mistake, or meaning may not be the whole story.
The fruit does not have to be an object, product, lesson, or measurable result.
It also does not have to appear at all.
imPEARma can prepare an offering with care, but it cannot prescribe what someone must discover there.
Collaboration may give an offering somewhere to travel.
An offering does not always need to end when it is received.
It may be changed, returned, shared, joined with other contributions, carried into ordinary life, or become part of something not yet imagined.
imPEARma hopes to cultivate relationships in which children, grown-ups, institutions, supporters, and the organization itself can influence what comes next.
Nourishment may move in many directions.
Any participant might offer something.
Any participant might receive something.
Collaboration does not need a predetermined outcome. It can allow the work to remain responsive to the people and possibilities it encounters.
It starts with the children.
imPEARma begins with online resources and art packages sent through the mail for children in kindergarten through third grade.
During these years, children’s worlds often expand rapidly into school and other larger shared systems.
Those systems may increasingly name, measure, categorize, and evaluate parts of their experience. They can also provide essential learning, relationships, structure, and care.
imPEARma does not exist in opposition to them.
We hope to offer something alongside them:
A little room for curiosity.
A little room for experimentation.
A little room in which the current answer does not necessarily have to become the only answer.
The work also welcomes the grown-ups, institutions, supporters, and other curious collaborators helping shape the conditions around children.
We’re beginning small.
imPEARma is an exploratory creative nonprofit in its formation era.
It is being developed for philanthropic support alongside other forms of nourishment, participation, and collaboration.
At launch, imPEARma is not yet formally registered or accepting financial contributions.
Its first work is to develop thoughtful creative offerings, establish a trustworthy public home, share Field Notes from the process, and build the organizational structure needed to hold future possibilities responsibly.
Those possibilities remain possibilities—not claims about work already underway.
We do not want imPEARma to appear larger than it is.
We are trying to begin with clarity, care, humility, and integrity.
We take small beginnings seriously.
Stewardship
imPEARma was initiated by John K. Lionheart, an multimedia artist, art director, facilitator, and maker whose work has long treated the experience surrounding an artwork as seriously as the artwork itself.
John currently stewards imPEARma through its founder-led formation era.
Founder-led does not mean founder-owned.
imPEARma is intended to remain larger than one person, one activity, or one moment in its development. As the organization grows, we hope its relationships, governance, and leadership can develop with appropriate care and accountability.
For those curious to explore more of the creative ground from which imPEARma has emerged, John’s wider practice includes reproductions of his illustrations at jrmutt.com. He also does his best to offer content & updates for his exploratory illustrations on his Instagram at @j.r.mutt. He also has created space for his landscape photography on Instagram at @magnificent_energies; and room for his photographic portraiture work on Instagram at @magnificent_beings.
When combined, he believes these intentional spaces offer a fuller sense of the attention to place, relationship, imagination, and experience that also informs imPEARma.
(Photo Caption: John, next to a mural he painted in Tepoztlān, Morelos, Mexico.)
Where Does the Clearing Go?
Maybe it does not go anywhere.
Maybe it becomes whatever comes next.
imPEARma does not hope to fix, direct, convert, optimize, or extract.
It hopes to offer.
To open a little room.
To invite collaboration without deciding what the collaboration must become.
To trust that what something is now may be meaningful without being final.
Whatever comes next, we hope the work remains faithful to the room it is trying to make.