In that moment of awareness, I had an epiphany, that the light we encounter on the road of death is our being in the act of coming home to itself. I understood that light is our natural state, but that we human beings must help each other as we move toward the shores of light. ...Being in the light is knowing we must get others into it. ...The light is where we belong. Everyone who is not in the light is looking forward to being there. So we leave the light to go and experience the need for light and thus come back to it anew.
I began to face death and its implications very young. I could never have imagined then how many kinds of death there were to follow, one heaped upon another. The death that was the tragic loss of my country, Tibet, after the Chinese occupation. The death that is exile. The death of losing everything my family and I possessed ... for we had been among the wealthiest and most famous in Tibet.