The Buddha's Last Instruction
by: Mary Oliver
"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, to send up the first
signal--a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
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.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of the frightened crowd.
Make of yourself a light.
I think that was Mary Oliver's mantra for most of her life. Reading one of her poems, take your pick, is like staring at a beautiful sunrise or sunset. Her words are like a million flowers on fire. Pink and violet and green and gold. Yet, Oliver also knows that, in the grand scheme of things, she's not needed, even though she feels herself blossoming into something mysterious and inexplicably precious in the first light of day.
Me? I know, also, that--if I don't wake up tomorrow, if my lungs and heart and brain decide to be done with the hard work of living--the planet will keep on spinning. The sun and moon will continue their journeys across the heavens. Lake Superior will keep churning and frothing. Sure, for a little while, someone will mourn me. Tears will be shed. But then, winter will arrive, with its cold, white eraser. In a few years, I'll just be a photograph, words on a page, posts in a blog.
That's the way things work.
A couple days ago, on a walk, I saw a mountain ash filled with berries. Little globes of sun nestled in the green sky of the tree. I stopped and took a picture of them. Because they were beautiful, and because someone needed to recognize that they were beautiful. They shed their light on me, and now I'm sharing that light with you.
I think that's the main job of a poet. Noticing. Recognizing. Sharing. I like to believe that Oliver would agree with me on this. Everyone carries light around with them. However, only a brave and generous person becomes a sun to others, spreading that light into the dark places of the world.
I hope that I'm a mountain ash tree, filled with a million little suns for the people in my life. When I'm gone, whether it's tonight, tomorrow, next week, nest year, or later, I want to be known as a child of light. That should be your hope, too.
And that is Saint Marty's last instruction for tonight.
❤️
ReplyDelete