Shrouded in the jungle’s eternal mist, I whooped at the top of my lungs against the cascade’s deafening roar, in duet with Mother Nature.
With a rev of the engine, the boat propelled my neon-vested torso under the rainbow and into the unrelenting spray of Salto San Martin, where I titled my head upwards toward 200-plus feet of sheer wonder.
On the horizon, a Great Dusky Swift spread its wings against the spray of the Garganta del Diablo, dwarfed by the fall’s immensity, and I was reminded that I am a mere speck on this great blue marble we call home.
As water cascaded around me in an endless flow, my mind flooded with thoughts of all that had come before me, and all that would one day go after.
Moments like this are so much greater than we can ever be. The world is so big and we are so small and there is something in that equation that, in its fragility, is ineffably beautiful.
Even now, two weeks later, I am still wonderstruck by the serendipity of my time in Iguazu—by all of the factors that collided in my life to transport me to that one impossibly beautiful Here and Now.
Could it be that life brought me to this dulce-de-leche-drizzled land called Argentina precisely to wind up in that very spot?
Though I may only have been on this earth for 19 years, I can’t help but think that maybe this is what it’s all about.
Perhaps life is about stumbling—upon unforeseen moments in time that change your perspective, and you, forever.
