Is there more to life? Ask the woman selling flowers.

     While in New Zealand for a retreat last September, on my way to Torbay, where Vaughan Park Retreat Centre is located, I stppoed in Devonport for coffee and at the pastry-shop, there was an advertisement on the glass door.  I noticed it because it was for a group about which someone had just asked me, and I thought it odd that I should be immediately thereafter confronted with an ad for it in a pastry-shop window!  "Is there more to life?" inquires a man who, in the main frame of the flier is looking over mountains he apparently has just climbed.... Is there more to life?  

     Across from the door in which the ad hung was a playful statue, on which people had hung various memorabilia - silk flowers, real flowers, and a scarf: a
memorial to a flower-peddler, who evidently brought some joy to this neighborhood.  Evident not only because a statue was dedicated to her, but because people continued to decorate it,  and in her death, as in life, this woman's spirit lives in the delight evoked by the playfulness of the statue, and the joy evidenced by the continued contributions towards the testimony of this person's life.