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"Make of yourself a light," said the Buddha, before he died. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness.... The light burns upward, it thickens and settles over the fields... Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached, in the blue air, I am touched everywhere by its ocean of yellow waves... And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire— clearly I'm not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value...
~ Mary Oliver, excerpts from "The Buddha's Last Instruction" in HOUSE OF LIGHT