It’s been one year

I got a Polaroid printer this morning.

This is the first photo I printed with it — the RIPPLE Station, one year to the day after I put those first 30 tokens beside our mailbox.

For eight years, I’ve been making tokens and handing them directly to people — grocery clerks, servers, custodians, flight crews, mail carriers. Over 3,000 of them, one conversation at a time.

Last year, I wondered: could that same invitation to notice everyday workers and have conversations with them, live on a sidewalk without me present?

Ino, my friend’s handyman, built the box.My daughter and I painted it teal. We filled it with 30 small, 2 x 4-inch mixed-media paintings and set it beside the mailbox.

I had no idea what would happen. But within the first few days, I had restocked it multiple times. 67 tokens gone in the first three days. Six days later, the total was 92.

In the last year, I’ve personally made and restocked somewhere around 1,000 unique paintings -- and this doesn’t include the hundreds of tokens I’ve continued to hand out in my own interactions with strangers.

But the more interesting part of this experiment isn’t the number.

It’s all the things I got wrong.

Neighbors loved the tokens but they didn’t always understand why they were there. One woman told me she used them as gift tags for her nephews’ and nieces’ Christmas presents. Others took them because they were pretty and used them as bookmarks.

Clearly, the signage needed work.

In January, I changed the words on the Station, so people could know at a glance that these weren’t meant to be little pieces of art to give to people we already know and love.

They were an invitation to widen our circle of attention: to notice someone we might otherwise walk past.

Like the person wiping our table, or the grocery stocker.

The crossing guard and the janitor.

The RIPPLE Station was never really an experiment in giving things away. It’s always been an invitation to get us to notice and engage with someone we might otherwise walk right past.

A year later, this experiment is moving beyond my front yard.

On August 23, another RIPPLE Station will launch at The Sweet Shop in Los Altos. But there’s an important difference. I won’t be making the tokens for this one all by myself. The community will be helping me.

Some people will make the tokens and stock the Station, while others will send them back out into the community.

And this fall, a mobile RIPPLE Station funded by the Generalist World 🌀Greenhouse Grant will begin traveling to other spaces in downtown Los Altos.

The little teal box beside my mailbox isn’t going anywhere. But what began as my personal practice of noticing people is slowly becoming something other people can practice, too.

Maybe that’s the ripple I’ve been trying to create all along.

માનસી