“It’s truth we’re after here,
hurting for, out in the streets”
–Yusef Komunyakaa, Safe Subjects

The Little Ripple Project started as a simple exploratory email from one struggling artist to her community about how to remain an honest and active participant in the broader global community. In response came a barrage of deeply moving emails and stories. She felt selfish holding them all in her small fist alone, away from the world. This blog is showcasing the real dialogues between people searching for truth and honesty through creative, artistic means. Read through the submissions and be inspired to keep pushing for change. Share your own story and become apart of the unfolding fabric. The little ripples that create waves, that change a nation, that ignite the universe. We’re looking for sparks.

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Below lives the original email sent to the masses.
Please take a moment to really learn where this came from.
Each response posted is a dialogue stemming from the
thoughts presented in this spur-of-the-moment exploration.

We’re just dying to know what you think, too.

Read on, then submit here:
caitlin.meissner@gmail.com

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Dear friends,

This is not private, though it is personal. It’s long as hell. I want you to read it. I picked you, with intention, because I care about you and wanted to share with people who have similar visions and goals and hopes for this broken world. Please read when you have a moment, and please feel free to share if it moves you. Annoying PSA: Excuse typos, unfinished thoughts and other mishaps. I’m actually hella sick but want to wipe some ish off my brain before dream time.

With love and light,
Caits

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Tonight I am nostalgic, remembering back to a time when “activism” played a more key role in my life. I was younger with a hunger to change the world in a big way. Everything (and I mean everything, down to my socks n’ shit) was a statement. It was a term I applied to myself openly and my work aligned with this in an obvious way: teaching babies a social justice curriculum for four years, working under a visionary in the disability field and helping folks with developmental disabilities to envision and execute meaningful versions of their lives (often through artistic vehicles.) Anti-racism trainings. Lots. Overtly political poetry. Every school project in college revolved around design that served the purpose of enlightening the public through things like hip safe sex packaging and benefit concert posters. Running a performance series for two years through a non-profit that fulfilled the dual purpose of exposing young women to creative career paths (and expressive outlets) and creating a platform and safe space for women of all ages in my local community.

But then something shifted. Perhaps not consciously, but something definitely shuffled it’s feet around. I started to really care about my art. Deeply. Not as a vehicle for social change, or a hobby that I’ve just always enjoyed, but as a serious, defining, can’t-be-happy-without-doing-this personal expression. At first it came with a piano-dropped-from-window feeling of utter guilt. Abandoning my self-created activist persona to be a POET? A poet who writes about shit like love? Can I do this? I must be a decidedly bad human being. Furthermore, I started to feel like a cheap impostor whenever someone in my community cited me as a “do-gooder.” “Save the glowing reviews, folks!”, I wanted to warn them. In 7th grade terminology, I was slowly becoming the poser I hated on at age 12 for putting Nirvana patches on their backpack but never actually owning any of their albums. Instead this time, I was like the person wearing the “Free Mumia” pin but couldn’t explain his story when grilled by a militant homie. No. Definitely not good.

Fast-forward to tonight. I’m sitting in a room full of folks on one of the coldest nights in who-knows-how-long at one of my many New York homes, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The history in this venue is rich, and certainly of a socio-political nature and I’m cozy. I feel like I still fit here, even though Julio gives me the raw end of every joke and berates me about not hanging there enough these days. (“Julio, I’ll kick your ass! Did you just say I look PREGNANT?!”) I’m sick as a damn dog but still proud to be apart of the last run of Darian Dauchan’s brainchild, The Spoken Word Almanac Project 2008. All the long year myself and this group of amazing folks have written. And written. And written. One piece per month on a current event to be shaped, sculpted and shifted into a surprisingly cohesive “year-in-review” through poetry, with a killer multi-media component backing us on stage. I’m really proud, man. I’m proud because we did this and people loved it. I’m proud because my people can really write sum shit. I’m proud because I was forced to write with a voice that reached beyond my own personal life. And it was certainly the year to do it.

All of this inner-monologue is rushing through me as I’m taking in the last incarnation of the show (and let me tell you, I could do this single-handedly by now, I know everyone’s pieces damn-near by heart), when suddenly the play button hits stop. Mahogany fills in for Shanelle during the Sean Bell piece. Shanelle’s written in the voice of Nicole, Sean’s fiance. Rico “unhinges his halo” to hand to Nicole during the multi-voice piece in which the lovers, one still living and one deceased, share their love, their fears and a promise to “someday, one day, meet again.” I’ve heard this piece so many times now. I know it inside out. But here I am, letting the tears roll over my cheeks, again. And then Bryan’s face comes on the video screen and I see the footage I’ve watched over and over, “Echo,” his poetic tribute to all those lost to police brutality. And I’m thinking about Oscar Grant. And here we are recapping 2008 and my god, 2009 is just beginning the same way. The folks on the new team this year are writing pieces about a young black man being killed unjustly by cops. Only this time his name is Oscar Grant. Will the subject matter in this year’s show be any different? The world seems to stay spinning on it’s axis and we, as a people, are becoming more desensitized to the violence and abuse. Myself included.

It’s heavy on my heart tonight. I’m thinking a lot about my own choices. I teach three classes, each which meet twice a week, to middle and elementary students. I teach them, essentially, how to express themselves with an eye to the current climate of their local and global world, how to think critically and become active responders using creative means. I mostly consider this my job, even though if you probed a bit deeper, yes, I’d also willingly admit it’s a strong passion. But still, how many times do I complain about not having full focus on my art “career?” I’m not writing Sean Bell pieces. And if I am, they are from an extremely personal place. My goal is not, nor has never been, to create social change through my poems or the music I’m embarking on. But how about this:

I’ve been revisiting my blog from the Ghana trip in my self-imposed healing house arrest and I came across this paragraph that I wanted to share. It’s part of a larger conversation in which (my favorite poet and) Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa asks the group what poetry’s function is in society. His answer, paraphrased:

Yusef calls on Plato. In his ideal republic, Plato banishes the poet. Why? Yusef thinks the poet forces us to pose questions. By posing a question, the reader is already active. Being told a message is passive. Language is political and silence is political. The image is subversive because it keeps reoccurring in our psyche, it haunts us. Yusef believes a short statement can be inserted into a poem successfully, but only depending on what happens around it. Often poets think too much about the meaning of the line and not the music. Sometimes we don’t want to understand the poem entirely. We must be wary of poems as emotional advertisements, lacking depth and mystery. Embrace the mystery.

So in this vision, the act of creating, of asking questions, of MOVING a human spirit, is inherently “active” and “political,” even when the subject is not about Obama’s plan of action with Gaza.

I read this entry to Jen B, just to make sure my thoughts aren’t completely, you know, yawn-inducing and self-indulgent and she pauses. “I hate to bring it back to this,” she says with a knowing smile, “but John Lennon’s whole “War is Over” campaign came about when he realized he’d just been writing songs about love and Yoko… but that voice was inherently political and important in and of itself.”

I grin, because I love Jen B and her examples a whole lot, but also because she is right. How many times have I been stuck emotionally and connected to that one poem or song that carried me through a trying experience? On a personal level, this artist’s creation was more important to my own journey of working to positively affect the world than, say, Malcolm X. Now, that is a bold statement, if there ever was one. And I am by no means dwarfing or scoffing at the incredible magnitude of this leader’s work or the inspiration he’s instilled in millions of people around the world and ME for that matter.

But understand what I’m saying.

That one piece of art helped you LIVE. Not change the world, not volunteer at the soup kitchen, but pulled you out of bed for another day of just putting one foot in front of the other. That small piece of joy allowed you to be more open, to be more free, to understand that your place in the world is, indeed, important. And from there you were able to sing again. To laugh again. To gain perspective and turn that perspective into something productive, challenging, something that puts said joy into something bigger and beyond yourself. The little ripple in Brooklyn causing waves in India.

The inauguration is coming. I’m not going. I have to work Tuesday and my body is still rife with germs. But even if it wasn’t, would I go? Probably not. The thought of being in Woodstock ‘09 DC-style is enough to make my skin crawl. Am I conflicted about missing such a historic event? Of course. But I’m not convinced this move makes or breaks the trajectory of the rest of my life as a caring, contributing citizen. What I propose instead, to all of us, inauguration-bound or not, is to live HONESTLY this year. To create honestly. To active and change and grow with integrity. Turn your skin inside out and be yourself, with or without flash, with or without judgment, with or without the troops rallying behind you. That’s all we can really ask of one another at the end of the day. But somehow, it ends up being the most difficult task to fulfill. So I’ll leave you here: what is YOUR truth? Write it down. Tell it to your best friend. Put it on a blog or in an email or sing it or design it or whatever you do to do you. And then send it to me. I’m gathering stories.

PS. The conversation has been happening for years.
Thanks to Jen B. for hipping me to this:

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