by Janie Brown
Michael Luco has been a Friend of Callanish for over twenty years since we started running our weeklong retreats, back in 1997. What sustains his generosity over so many years? Perhaps it’s the sheer joy of contributing to what he feel matters.
click to enlarge
I met Michael when he ran a little garden store called Earthrise on West 4th Avenue in Vancouver. Although I come from a family of gardeners, I didn’t know very much in those days about what plants grow best in our region and how to care for them. Most Saturdays in the early nineties, I dropped by Earthrise to look around. Soon, I was a regular, like many other people, who also wanted to spend time in Michael’s company. The store became a gathering place to meet new friends.
A year or so later, I asked Michael if he would come to my recently-purchased home to give some advice about re-designing our front garden. Being a landscape architect, Michael offered us a deeply creative vision, that included an arbour at the entrance and some new beds. He said that it was boring to walk in a straight line from the street to the front door of any house, and that a meander through little rooms of space would be much more pleasing. “We need to slow down and make the journey more important than the destination,” he said with the wisdom I had grown to admire. Michael and I became fast friends, over the creation of this small garden of exquisite beauty.
Michael quickly learned about Callanish and what it was all about. He soon offered to help by donating flowers for our weeklong retreats. He wanted people to have posies of beauty beside their beds on arrival at retreat weary from the rigours of cancer treatment. For over twenty years now, Michael has donated flowers for every retreat and also for our seasonal Equinox and Solstice community gatherings in the city. Each bouquet that sits in the centre of our circle of twenty to forty people is different and stunningly beautiful. Like creative people might, he regularly asks, “Was it okay—was it too colourful, too big, too wild, too dark?” I respond in the same way every time, “It’s perfect.” Beauty lifts up the spirit and helps soften the layers of pain and struggle. It makes life feel doable.
Many people make beautiful flower arrangements, but other people, like Michael, are medicine people who create works of art that can provide deep healing medicine.
Recently, I texted Michael to ask if he could help with some flowers for Aimee’s memorial service. He said, “Of course,” as he always does. I asked if I could come to the flower auction with him as I had always wanted to see where he had gone all these years to choose flowers for Callanish. That’s when he surprised me by telling me that a few months back he had given up his van. He now travelled by bus to pick up the flowers. The journey takes him a good hour each way to catch two buses to the flower auction in southeast Vancouver. I also learned that not only did he take the bus to the auction, on his way home he makes several stops at friends’ gardens to forage for rosehips, or greenery, or particular black, white or red berries depending on the season and his vision. I was flabbergasted. Michael travels by bus for a good part of a day around Vancouver to collect flowers to create his masterpieces, and I hadn’t known it. “I love doing it this way,” he told me. “It’s how I play my part for climate change, by not driving a vehicle anymore.” “How do you carry all the flowers and shrubbery?” I asked. “Oh, you know, a friend sometimes takes me or I carry them on my lap.”
I offered to drive him on that particular day and had one of the most fun and enjoyable days of my year. After the flower auction where he stopped to talk to many vendors he had known for years, Michael directed me and my car down this lane and that. One corner offered a particularly beautiful shrub of wild roses, and the next a gorgeous red Japanese maple overhanging the fence which he clipped carefully so as not to interfere with the architecture of the tree. The next stop was at a garden in Shaughnessy to clip some climbing hydrangeas. “My friends don’t mind, it’s a good pruning for the plant,” he said.
We have a multitude of loyal and generous Callanish friends, donors and supporters, but if I could pick up an Order of Canada or an Oscar for this beautiful, generous and humble man, I would. Although, I know he wouldn’t really want it.
Here is a poem about Michael written by one of our Callanish retreat participants.
Michael
by MaryAnne Brown
This is the moment before,
the moment of pause
because we have done everything
we could think to do in preparation
for tomorrow.
There might easily be
and likely is
something we’ve forgotten, something
that would have been helpful
or even necessary to the unfolding
of tomorrow.
But in this moment
we can only stop and
take each other’s hands
and breathe
and notice deeply
the now of it all
and ground our hearts
and rest our minds
and wait together
to learn what the dawn brings.
And when doubt returns,
remind each other
that Michael Luco’s flowers
sit in cellophane wraps
in the large white bucket out back
waiting patiently in the crisp air for the moment
all the ready elements of magic
are brought together in their wild beauty,
the culmination of our striving
unfolding as the Universe attends.
Janie Brown is the Executive Director and co-founder of Callanish. She has worked with people with cancer and their families for over 30 years, including several years as a clinical nurse specialist at the BC Cancer Agency and over 20 years in her oncology counselling practice. She also writes for her blog www.janiebrown.com
MaryAnne Brown first came to Callanish in 2009 during treatment for genetic bilateral breast cancer and has been coming ever since. Now in remission but living through unexpected permanent side effects from treatment, she continues to benefit from having been able to attend two younger adult retreats, a writing retreat and a regular retreat. She is forever grateful for the honesty, vulnerability and kindness shared in Callanish circles that encourages her to show up and participate no matter how low her energy is. The cookies help, too!