Sky burial

There's something incredible about being kilometers up in the sky and the clouds so close that you can just reach up and wiggle your fingers to have them touch you. Being high makes you want to go even higher. That feeling pushes itself until you're not just with the clouds, but surging and flying past them. All you want to do is climb every mountain around you and then after that, climb even higher.

It would be wrong to ignore the fact that the sky burial was most likely borne out of practical considerations: the lack of fuel source for cremation, or the rockiness of the ground, preventing in-ground burial. But I'd like believe to some degree that it also encapsulates that wish to fly straight up into the sky after a lifetime of being so agonizingly close.

The burial goes like this: the corpse is cut into tiny pieces by Tibetan specialists. Bones and cartilage are ground into a pulp and mixed with yak butter and others. It is all left on a mountaintop, where vultures and elements wear the body down until ideally nothing remains. The birds and the wind carry every piece of the body into the sky. Some sources say that it is a final act of compassion to the rest of the world, giving alms to the birds. At the same time, it perhaps also reunites the body with that which resides just above it.

Either way, its a practice that as far as I know only exists in Tibet. There's a sort of perfect sense to it that is awe inspiring.

Anyways, what is it about retrospective romanticizing? There was hardly any reflection while I was in Tibet - only afterwards.