On the edge of Yazd, two towers rise from the desert.

I climbed both of them.

Standing on that hill, you move through a barren landscape toward a circle of stone and silence.

The Dakma — built within Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest monotheistic religions, rooted in ancient Persia and woven into the spiritual memory of this land.

What strikes you first is not the structure itself.

It is the air.

The stillness.

The feeling that this place has held ritual for centuries.

You think of all the people who came here to release their loved ones.

To stand in this silence.

To trust the sky.

To surrender something precious to a reality larger than themselves.

Slowly, the place begins to open.

In Zoroastrianism, death was approached with a particular kind of care.

The elements — earth, fire, water, air — were understood as pure and worthy of protection.

And so the body, after death, was not buried into the ground and not given to fire.

It was brought here, placed beneath the open sky, and returned in a way that would not disturb what was sacred.

Bodies were laid around the inner circle of the tower, exposed to light, wind, and birds.

What can seem unfamiliar at first begins to feel deeply considered the longer you stay with it.

Not abandonment, but return.

Not indifference, but responsibility.

That is what stayed with me while exploring these two towers.

There is something profoundly humbling in a ritual shaped by reverence, restraint, and trust.

A civilization asking not only how to live, but also how to leave.

At the heart of Zoroastrian philosophy are three simple principles:

Good Thoughts.

Good Words.

Good Deeds.

Standing there, I kept thinking about how much is contained in those words.

How they reach beyond daily life and touch something larger — conduct, legacy, and the way a human being moves through the world.

Maybe even the way one lets go of it.

What stayed with me most was not death itself.

It was presence.

This is what presence looks like when you stop needing to understand

and allow yourself to witness.

Iran keeps reminding me that traditions are rarely random.

They are shaped by thought, by ethics, by centuries of living in relationship with land, light, time, and the invisible.

We should not forget these roots.

Not only because they belong to Iran,

but because their influence has traveled through time — through ideas, rituals, symbols, and ways of seeing that continue to echo far beyond their origin.

The two Towers of Silence left me with a quiet question:

What does it mean to leave this world responsibly?