Geshe-la Speaks of Sky Burial

[T]here are six realms of existence in which all deluded beings exist…. Although the realms appear to be distinct and solid, as our world seems to us, they are actually dreamy and insubstantial. They interpenetrate one another and we are connected to each.”
~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

To find a human corpse while walking is good luck,
he smiled. I laughed, recalling morbid photos of
a tundra where a shriveled face and arms were sucked
quite clean and red by vultures’ final act of love.

I didn’t ask him, Why good luck? It just made sense,
despite the fact that here such luck would make a man
grow pale and cry, or call the law. We don’t dispense
our bones this way. We box them for the promised land.

One friend surmised the luck is in the end of life’s
great suffering. But I say luck is witnessing
that body as myself. No longer someone’s wife
or child or love—a dissipating fleshy dream.

With any luck what’s left of me will be this eye.
Bequeath me to the buzzards. Bury me in sky.

2013
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen,
Padma Thornlyre and Julie Cummings