Shamanic Dance

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Postscript. This is an "old" (almost two year old) image that I had inexplicably not processed from its raw state until having recently "discovered" it on my hard drive while looking for another (completely unrelated) picture. It's not that I did not think of it as a “keeper" worth processing soon after I captured it; rather, I simply overlooked it before I moved on to other things. It's existence is a reminder that our hard drives are likely full of "old and forgotten" (perhaps never properly "seen" and/or processed) photographs, behooving us to set aside time every once in a while to retrace old steps. The image depicts a tiny waterfall my wife and I passed while walking from the parking lot we left our car in on the Canadian side of Niagara falls in October 2023 (specifically, at Dufferin Islands Nature Area) to the falls themselves. Intriguingly, it is this shot (or something very close to it) - and, saliently, not an image of Niagara Falls themselves - that my brain conjures as a mental image whenever I hear "Niagara Falls" mentioned; and that (for me) depicts the "soul" of Niagara so much more directly (certainly, more poetically) than the iPhone panorama that appears below. 

Little did I realize that my mental image is a memory of an experience I had forgotten I'd photographed. Perhaps, with a nod to shamanic truths, I do not realize that my life is a but memory of an experience I had forgotten I'm always living!