“You have to eat, you can’t go without!” they told us again, and made us sit down again and eat. Whatever it was, we had to eat. “There is so much death around us, if you don’t eat, an accident might happen!”

Toraja, Sulawesi

To believe it or not, but of course I ate. I ate even the strangest food we were sharing, even such that you cannot bite but you just have to swallow the semi-transparent thing down. Having done that, they catch a chicken in the garden. “This is for dinner.” Earlier that day there was a phone call for our mom in the house were we were staying, that her once had passed away. Yeah, the death was certainly around. We had already been to so many funerals, and saw so many lives taken, one more bloody than the other. But there was also something magical in the air, in these mantras, and under this bright-starred night or humid and hot daytime. There was sweat and rain in the air, mud and blood everywhere. So the men are singing their mantras in the language of Toraja, unknown for me, but it definitely sings about eternal things, such as the circle of life and the worlds beyond. The life does not stop here with the moment we have named a death, but there’s so much more life out there. It’s in the trees, in the rocks, in the places untouched by human far away. Puang Matua, the creator is behind all that. There is much more than bare life and death and flesh and blood. There is much more than killing of thousands of animals, that definitely don’t deserve it.

People are often buried in the caves, inside the rock. And there are always guards outside, keeping everything in peace, being there for a reason. This is just beautiful who much the respect and love their ancestors, whose deal actually doesn’t matter much anymore, but they still do it, irrationally, in belief.

Little babies who die when they are still so little, under a year – they are buried inside of the big trees. This tree was so powerful, that it almost knocked me down emotionally.