It’s that time of year again. This year, the calendar was dedicated to my Mom and we had a special guest for the launch. Dad came along to the all-staff meeting we had at KV and spoke movingly of how happy Mom would have been to see the work the school is doing.
This is one of my favorite moments of the calendar process: handing it over to the team for their approval. I think they liked it.
I have always gone to Delhi for the calendar - Shalini and I sit for hours and hours with the guys in what I have always thought of as the “press” - now I see that was just the beginning. What we did was to sit with the guys in the first stage of the process: the photo corrections, typesetting, layouts, etc. It’s all done on computers and it’s pretty quiet (though exhausting - we emerge into the daylight from the hermetically sealed basement-cave they work in all bugged-eyed and shattered). This year, because of a problem with last year’s finishing touches, I decided to go to Delhi again for the actual printing, binding and hole punching.
Now THIS is a PRESS. Full court and all.
What a place. Thomson Press is enormous. I walked over a mile in my short time here, just going from one machine to another. The machines are the frightening type that make you think of severed fingers and flying limbs - they are huge and powerful and loud and very, very fast. I loved it.
It brought back memories of visiting Mom at Leary Press, where she went each week to supervise the printing of The Anchor (the diocesan newspaper she edited for many years) and I just love that I am following so closely in her footsteps. She would have just loved my producing a calendar year after year. She is, in fact, the inspiration for it.
35 years ago, the calendar she liked the best stopped being produced. It was a cheap thing, and ugly, but it was functional. It had what she wanted: each month’s page also had the entire year’s calendar printed at the bottom. She liked being able to plan for months in advance without having to turn the page. She was so disappointed at not being able to get it anymore that I decided to surprise her that Christmas by making her one.
Hand-drawn. At the bottom of each page, I drew the entire year, one little box for each month. I was doing the November page when my aunt walked in and said casually “Why don’t you just do the year once, on the last page, and cut the rest of the sheets at the bottom so it’s always visible?” DUH!
It was just one of many things about calendars I would learn by doing, and each year, I believe, the Karuna Vihar calendar gets better because of what we learned the previous year. This year, what I learned was that, in spite of the huge machines that Thomson Press owns, there are many parts of the process which are still done by hand. Going to the factory and meeting the guys engaged in the actual operations is worth the effort. Telling them about Karuna Vihar and getting them on board makes the calendar a better thing. Inclusion!
Time to put on your thinking caps! I know it’s only April, and that 2009 is still a long way off, but this is about the time when we traditionally start thinking about next year’s calendar. It’s quite a process. First, we need a theme. Then we start searching for the perfect quotes and poems. Then I sift though our photo archives, looking for those that might go magically with the new quotes. Then we set up shoots for the photos we don’t have and then, invariably, find MORE quotes for the new photos. It’s a wonderful, meditative process in which I lose myself year after year - beautiful images, inspiring quotations - the sifting, the sorting, the weighing and balancing. I love every moment of it.
There is a whole group of people who participate in this process every time - people who love poetry, photography, the whole concept of putting thoughts and images together in a unified theme. I wait for their contributions each year and delight in sharing the decisions with them. You are welcome to join us!
The themes we are considering this year include:
Generosity
Focus
Knowledge
Experience
Journey
Often the theme is suggested by the discovery of one particularly wonderful quotation or poem and we build the rest of the year around it. The idea of Journey came from a poem Anne Bruce, our Scottish Speech Therapist (and voracious reader) shared with me:
When you travel
You find yourself
Alone in a different way
More attentive now
To the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eyes watching
You abroad;
And how what meets you
Touches that part of the heart
That lies low at home
When you travel
A new silence goes with you
And if you listen
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.
A journey can become a sacred thing.
John O’Donoghue
I’m waiting for your response: ideas, thoughts, suggestions, photos, poetry, please!
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