Greenspeed , outside the box 5 by Moneca Kaiser , May, 05 2011
front back
I haven’t had business cards for years… All my work comes from people telling other people anyways and I couldn’t decide on a new design. Now I have and I’m pleased with them. I would hire me based on this card.
The logo on the front of the card was created by my teacher, my mentor and most precious friend, in Asia we would call him a master but here that is so loaded with all kinds of weird cult like connotations cause we live in an “I did it MY way, ” kind of culture or cowture as it sometimes feels like. (we’ll see when the election results come in later tonight, I hope he doesn’t get back in.)
When I was in Costa Rica a few years ago teaching a course on restoring the watershed through second home development in the tropics and making a film about it…
the too long awaited, A Watershed Moment. My someday debut as an auteur doc maker with a memoirists element of magical realism has been on the back burner for way too long. I wish the fear would subside and I would get back to it. I forget fear rarely subsides. It sort of gets squelched or served up rare so it’s still pink and quivery and sometimes gets melted by love but not often enough, mostly it gets in the way and also ever guides me home. Always has.
Mostly I’ve known since I was a child that whatever was the scariest is likely the path I need to follow, not in an adrenalin junky kinda way, in a shake in my grandmother’s boots all the way to China kind of paralysis and always and ever it’s about having a voice and being ….. an artist. The fear I mean, this terrifies me, or did, still some but less… still too much.
Ah but we were in Costa Rica, I was teaching, and it don’t come easy to me, the teaching thing, almost paralyses me, freaks me out and freezes me. It’s hard for me even being one of the most confident people I know. I would find myself almost arrogant I have such deep confidence were it not for my redemptive unexpected lack of pretension and genuine delight in all my foibles or rather the foibles I get into if foibles actually means as fun as it sounds. I fall flat and go SPLATT and wipe off the muck to begin again again and again … multiple foibles are part of my art.
And still even with all my almost arrogance I lack a certainty that I actually know anything. It’s weird and makes it hard to teach and the only thing I know and this is where the confidence comes in, is that I can find it inside, that it’s there. In this I have an unshakable faith even though I feel I struggle with the drug i lost lunacy more than most, I loose days and weeks and ridiculous amounts of precious creative energy eating chocolates and worrying about being fat.
It’s crazy and when my little 11 year old niece who is so perfectly perfect says she’s fat, I at 45 can’t even know better or rather show better cause so much of having a voice is more ok if I am fat. And this I will save for another story cause it’s about entitlement and oppression and society and Christianity looms in there somewhere oppressive and Heavy and it would be too much for said most precious niece so instead …
I rehearse in my heart to tell her,
Oh but how I love you. I tell myself I have to stop telling her she’s not fat and validate her feelings and listen to her and ask her, “if you didn’t feel fat what would you feel?” Cause I love her I can feel this through… that this would be kind and loving maybe even helpful but it would be better if I could just show her and I can’t cause I get stuck in the same place too much, but I can here. I can show her that this is how it is for me, this is why I LOVE my blog cause it’s true and it’s ok to have really really cool business cards, (they R right??) I love them and feel fat. And if more of us could say so instead of being all slick like the cards all the time, who knows what business would look like let alone life.
And imagine if I could be so sweet and kind to myself when I feel fat as I long to share with my precious niece, imagine what a world this would make… and I feel this is my only duty, I wish you might adopt it as yours too. To be so very kind to ourselves that it can wash over all the rest of us and I appreciate it’s so hard to do, cowture…
and I appreciate its the only way that things will get better, it needs to start at home literally inside not for the niece, Loving our nieces is easy peasy especially if they are cherubic and bossy, what fat??
But loving me? Yes YOU! it couldn’t be!
Then WHO ?
Ah but again we were in Costa Rica, I wrote a great story about that trip, maybe I will share it next week but I gotta say its gonna make the blog feel tame… Are you up for that?
The beauty of teaching or being a designated teacher, and not just in Costa Rica, is it’s like being Bond, James Bond. with a license to kill but instead it’s a license to LOVE, (even better) And I love it when I have the courage which is rare cause it terrifies me like I said but it’s so sweet to be able to help people feel their way through, to show them how I do once I get over that I am not of the hemisphere that does anything in a linear, read culturally legitimate for a teacher fashion, so instead I encourage them to play and take risks.
But I wanted to tell you about this lovely lovely Japanese woman who was living in the eco center with her Japanese lover who was so boring, I don’t know why but as soon as he opened his mouth I would yawn but Miko wasn’t she was slow and careful and poignant all the time, and she dressed cool with a scarf around her head short shorts that were inadvertently sexy and a little belly sticking out… and they were learning about permaculture and cosmic stuff all the while infusing our world with this ancient and so very honourable culture of their heritage and miko though I think her name was even better than that but I forget it well she told me that, “in my culture a fifty year apprenticeship is…” I can’t remember the word but it meant like mundane, of course one would need 50 years to even begin to understand one’s art. That fifty years is the proverbial drop in the bucket.
I just don’t know where the bucket is though and I miss my teacher, he hasn’t been feeling well and I keep worrying that if gold can rust what of us mere mortals… and I miss him and he is right here. Right here, now, always and I forget about my unshakable faith about it all being right inside of each of us. I keep loosing my bucket and feeling thirsty forgetting I have drops…
When I told him, my dear teacher, that I wanted to write and make films which I do, cause it terrifies me and I know it’s my true calling, and cause I love it, I said, “Ah Sifu, who am I? Who am I write and make films?” and my precious, so sublimely honorable and noble Sifu answered,
If not you Lulu, then who?”
See many years ago when I started my business I asked him to create a logo for me and he did, it’s the one on the front of my business card. He told me, “Lulu someday people will bow down to business with you.” And it’s become true, I am blessed with such wonderful clients. He has taught me to be, not taught me allowed me, made it safe for me to be myself and to be kind and honorable in all my dealings, he has taught me to not expect or even desire perfection from anyone except myself for none of us is, not even him and always he is kind and I wish I will be too.
He told me my logo means one hundred percent perfect, that it’s a symbol of honour on an elite level, that I should have it embossed in Gold, real gold, this is the vision he sees in me, this great man. And I was too shy, I couldn’t do gold then, it was, must have been about 15 years ago now, but I am ready for silver and silver calls to me with a clarity and pristine aspiration in my wish to create homes for us all.
And the back of the card is my love letter to us all and my Sifu’s greatest gift, I may not be ready to move into sharing stories full time yet, may not have it in me to be this raw and honest every single moment as an artist must, I believe they have to risk everything every moment as my teacher has, his art is so brilliant, his work is I am sure what heaven’s landscape will be when it greets me. But I am writing to you each week and even on an eve such as this when I was sure I had nothing to share this great teacher this most precious friend, this love of my life, inspires me to just be me and know that the mountain isn’t the mountain today though it will be again. That’s what he taught me and I share with you with all my love.
And to grow this business that has such a high standard and aspires to such a noble seal of approval into an entity that can continue to make a positive and loving contribution to our world. To allow it to evolve slowing into something much bigger than me and in keeping with the vision of greatness that is the seed of it’s life that I might move into sharing stories cause I believe it’s our stories that will heal our world. The building, the designing, the business I do love it but it’s not my medium, I am a visionary I love creating this but there will be people who will exceed even my high standards who will come to be a part of this community who I will teach, with deepest humility why my name is on everything we do and I hope this will live on well beyond my drop in this bucketless little lifetime.
and for now I’m not quitting my day job, in fact we’re hiring! I feel inspired to grow this enterprise, it’s time and it’s fun. We’re having a delightfully busy spring time. I would like to meet any talented tradespeople, project managers, admin and creative people, and especially someone who would like to sort me out… all the usual suspects, please send me your friends! Whomever you feel inspired to share with me and I will explore where this leads.
3 Comments
Moneca Kaisersays:
May 2, 2011 at 10:36 pmand when I say I find it inside it’s through you in us when we share that I know where to look
Cindy Deachmansays:
May 5, 2011 at 7:30 amLike your business card, Moneca. Nice clean lines, nice clean look. Interesting that it’s black & white. Unusual.
Cindy
Gailsays:
May 14, 2011 at 8:39 amThe symbol of honour given by your Sifu is stunning — a perfect, clean expression of negative and positive space that evokes your design talent and could hold all and any aspiration. It’s a kind of symbol-gift that now is circulating in the true manner of gifting that Lewis Hyde wrote about more than 25 years ago in that brilliant book, “The Gift” that I’ve returned to, as “evaluations” on a recent workshop I gave in Saskatoon arrive in the form of poems! I think your reflections on phat, love, nieces, and the rest converge in this symbol that has the power to guide you and those around you… So yeah! I love your “card”, too! ~ Gail
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