Diana's Baths solo

We are home now and it is nice. Before we left New Hampshire though I got an opportunity to visit Diana's baths by myself. The kids fell asleep in the car and Grace dropped me off. It turns out that I was actually within walking distance of the water falls. This means I got to explore more and also see how we would explore in future years as a family. It seemed very exciting and challenging to crawl from rock to rock, but I saw all the ten year old's doing it. I cannot picture Noah  or Jonah as a ten year old and can only think of him and his personality now. So it scares me to think of a tantrum near a cliff's edge. But I guess they grow out of that.
I went under the waterfall again. It took me a while to bear up and do it, even though I see other people go under it like it's nothing. I realized though it's not so much the pressure of the waterfall. It's that it's cold. I guess my tolerance for pain or discomfort is much lower than it was when I was younger. I remember jumping into the New England Ocean much more readily as a child. No it's no way. Why?
I went to other pools and smaller falls. I saw a lot of teens lounging on the rocks in the sun with towels over their faces. I eventually did the same. I've read that in shamanistic trances the shaman will lie down covering the eyes to have darkness and while a drum beat is played. I tried to see if the rhythm of the falling water could be like that beat. Being inside waterfalls also has shamanistic and meditative significance. There are plenty of Kung Fu/Karate scenes of people doing Kung Fu under a water fall. My Si Hing said that the pressure of the falls could act as a weight under your punch. Some scenes show the practitioner with his/her body under the water and the punches not weighted down. But even without the weight, there is a mind numbing sensation of constant cold water crashing down on you. It is very other consciousness. In fact when Monkey King jumps through a waterfall, he not only becomes king, but the whole monkey group suddenly jumps into civilization because they discover an abandoned kingdom.
The author made up the story but the flower curtain reference has Taoist significance (so say the footnotes) but I haven't really studied up on that. I only noticed that from that fantasy novel, all the Taoist "demons" the Monkey comes up against are not part of one religion, rather these animal spirits learn the Tao independently instead of being part of one "Church."
And while I don't know of many animals that actually became humans and started temples and religious movements in real life, Shamanism stresses finding you power animal and that sort of thing and again, many cultures use waterfalls in order to attain an altered consciousness.
Anyway, I tried to soak up as much scenery and Zen like feeling as possible to use from memory in my meditation time at home, where we are now, enjoying Bob the builder.