For Lou Micallef

Louise,

You were alway curious,
but i never thought you would find out what lay that side of death
until many years hence.

so it feels peculiar to talk about you as one lost
from this moment, this world, this biosphere

i know that you meditated often, but you were always present here in the 'now'.
it feels so wrong to speak about you in the past tense.

Can't we meet up again?
I want to see you. and talk.

I want you to come, and we can watch the ducks
and marvel at the blades of grass
and the coincidences of life.

I want you to embody that joy that i see in you everywhere you go
closing your eyes, holding the precious moment in your embrace of the world.

You died, a sheet of metal wrapped around a tree. A victim of that which you love, and the drudgery of long country roads.

That image is too much one of cruel finality. i can't leave it there- I can't accept that to be true.
You left your trace- spreading your spirit like glitter everywhere you went.
I'll retrace those steps, and try to spread it all further, so that the world glints like wet pavements in the sun.


---------------------------
I have a story.

Last month, I sat in the Fair Trade Cafe in Glebe with Lou, - we were wet from rain and had taken shelter from a thunderstorm that had evicted us from sitting beside the pond in Victoria Park.

Lou was telling me a story about their work with farmers in the Hunter bioregion (as the BeansTalk co-operative obtains regional fresh food.)

Bek Spies and Monique Wicks came in to the cafe, so I asked Lou to repeat the story to them.
It goes like this:

The BeansTalk food co-op has established such strong links with farmers, that they know when farmers are in distress.

With the drought, there was an organic strawberry farm in the Hunter that was in crisis, to such an extent that they could not afford to employ strawberry pickers to take the crop.

So what did the BeansTalk co-op people do? They piled in a minibus and brought everyone up to the farm. They picked the strawberries themselves, and paid the farmers for them.

The farmers were soooo grateful.


isn't that beautiful???

(maybe someone else knows the details of the story better, so fill in the blanks!)