Van Zutphen, Ted

Svetlana Marisova (March 17, 1990 - September 7, 2011) was born near Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, and moved with her parents to New Zealand in 2004. A precocious child, with a voracious appetite for poetry and the writings of the the great spiritual 'fathers', she chose to enter a life of contemplative prayer emptying herself of possessions, relationships and self-fulfillment and yield to the divine. This direction was curtailed in late 2009 with a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. Over the two remaining years of her life she developed a passionate interest in haiku finding in it a way to give e...