Hi! Welcome to “What’s Your Story,” the every other Tuesday space where I invite YOU to participate in the writing. Thank you to everyone who participated in Your Serendipity Story. Nine great stories are available to read there now and it’s never too late to add your own. For each episode, I offer a writing prompt. In 200 words or less, YOU get to practice telling YOUR story.
On Saturday, I told my terrifying Hawaii story of almost dying in the ocean the day before my 47th birthday. (see Bonus Life) I was tempted to make today’s prompt either “Your Near Death Experience” or “Your Terrifying Moment,” but I decided instead to switch gears and use the word thrilling. It’s a fun word to say outloud. Give it a try… “Wow! That was thrilling.” In 200 words or less (word counter), tell us your thrilling experience story.
What experience made your every nerve ending come alive? What moment took you to that place where fear and joy collide? What activity keeps calling you back for one more taste of the awesome thrill? Tell us your story.
*** If you’d prefer to write about your terrifying moment or near death experience, we’d love to read it.
Tip of the Week: When you’re writing, experiment with using a word or two that you don’t usually use in your everyday speech. I love this Thesaurus to find words that say the same thing but sound different coming out of my mouth.
Keep it 200 words or less. Be honest. Have fun. Leave your contribution in the comments. I’ll go first.
When Hallie was born in 1998, the back third of our yard was a dense forest of brush and unkept pine trees. One day, I decided that I was going to clear it all out to make room for a sand box. It turned into a huge project that’s worthy of it’s very own Saturday Substack, but the part I want to tell here is this. When I cleared all the brush out and removed all the low branches of the pines, we were left with a beautiful canopy of majestic trees with high hanging branches. My next door neighbors, Merl and Barb gave us a really cool mesh infant swing and I hung it from a branch that was about 20 feet up. Hallie loved the thrill of swinging in that swing and I loved the thrill of seeing how high I could get her. She was totally secure in the seat and I would put my whole body into getting her into the sky. I would do anything to go back there for a few minutes and experience the joy that I felt seeing her joy as she sailed through the air.
In 1986, I was living in northern Nicaragua, doing fieldwork for a doctorate in anthropology. The city of Estelí, where I lived, was pretty well defended from the U.S-supported Contras which were attacking civilians, health centers, etc., but the war was raging along the border with Honduras. I worked with the national women’s organization, A.M.N.L.A.E., and a major focus were the northern areas under attack, where families were gathered together from their scattered farms so they could be more easily defended from the Contras. For one week, I rode with soldiers and A.M.N.L.A.E. workers into these remote areas. We traveled along the winding, mountain roads in a military vehicle, their rifles at the ready, every rock or bump causing hearts to jump into throats, as there were land mines everywhere. We heard rifle fire every night as we tried to sleep on hammocks or dirt floors. And yet, witnessing young women and men defending their revolution and trying to improve the lives of their fellow citizens gave to me a kind of deep respect for the human spirit which might be called joy.
In 1965 I was visiting friends in Utah and they decided to take me to Timpanogos Cave. The hike up took 1 1/2 hours. The pathway was sufficiently wide, but on one side the mountain went straight up and on the other it went straight down, with no guardrail and several sharp curves.
Needless to say, it was steep but not too bad for an acrophobic like me because we were looking up.
The cave tour was a fantastically beautiful experience. THEN we had to hike down.
It was very hard to walk, not run, because of how steep the trail was. There were sharp curves that looked out over nowhere. Again, no guardrail. My thigh muscles were aching with exhaustion and just wanted to give up and run. It was as terrifying to hike down as it was as thrilling to hike up and through the caves.
I love words and love new words but I don't have capacity today ...bedrest, pain , dead weight body and exhaustion ... I know I can be excused here x
Thrilling , exuberant, exhilarating , ecstatic.. life at its finest ... I've had a great life , so so many ecstatic times . Where we meet life at its pinnacle .. where every nerve ending , heart singing , spirit soaring feeling is felt . No room for anything less ..
Health doesn't allow me to have the bigger experiences right now . But what I've learnt ( amongst sooo many things) is the ecstatic is relative it doesn't necessarily need big .
I open a window now and I get a thrill , talk to bug life in the garden and feel great joy , meditate my way to bliss and have a day of low symptoms ..
One of my great joys is the window I often get late evening when I can dance in the bathroom watching myself in the window and pretend I'm on stage 😊
I'd travelled Bristol to Inverness by plane to go and stay at the Findhorn Spiritual Community on the north east coast of Scotland . One of the largest conscious communities in Europe . Id come to the end of the retreat which was held at Cluny Hill, a very grand and glorious old Victorian spa hotel . Before flying home id decided to stay with a women who lived in a small Scottish cottage on the coast at Findhorn Bay so quaint and sweet . I felt like I was in another world being so far north. I went for a walk along the beach through the sand dunes . I gasped, the beach was covered with pink, green and every colour stone stunning. The air the freshest I'd ever breathed, high on life I lay face down on the beach not a person in sight and completely let go of ,, ... me .
In the evening, I opened my bedroom window to the sound of seals in the water. I walked along the small jetty and out to the northern sky ... The sky oh the sky .. a darkness yet big swirls of pale blue , almost green. The feeling : hard to describe completely free , at one with the world ,.... Not a person in sight ....
It's said the northern lights can be seen from Findhorn the ' aurora polaris' . I think I did not in its full glory ...but an exclusive glory just for me ...
I learned to ski at age 23 at Chestnut Mountain in Galena, IL. I had grown up "outdoorsy" going camping, hiking, biking and canoeing, but my middle class upbringing in South Central Illinois never afforded the chance to go on a ski trip. It never occurred to me there was skiing in the Midwest until I lived in Chicago. I took a youth group from the Chicago suburbs on a ski trip to Galena not knowing what was in store for me. Along with the kids, I got on the slopes and before long I could make turns and go down all the blue runs. All day I kept saying, "Where has this been all my life?" I couldn't believe the thrill of skiing down those (icy) slopes! I learned the "need for speed". Determined to milk every minute out of the day, a few die-hard kids and I skied until 10pm. The last few runs were dicey with solid ice but that didn't deter this newfound love. I began to ski every winter in Wisconsin until I moved to Colorado and became a ski instructor. The thrill of speeding down a slope at night never got old, especially as I learned to ski bigger (black) and longer runs with powdery snow.
Mar 12, 2022·edited Mar 12, 2022Liked by Hal Walker
I was hiking with some friends at Point Reyes in California. The signs near the cliff said “Do not go near the cliffs. People have died here.” I said “OK” and continued walking. Both Aimee and Steve wanted to go down to the beach. Steve said, “Those signs are just for the tourists. We’re not tourists. Besides, we can find another way up closer to the point that’s not so steep.” So we slid down the side of the cliff as the earth crumbled beneath our feet. The tide was low. On the beach was a herd of sea lions that waddled out to see. Tide pools were full with bright fish and seaweed. It was beautiful. When it was finally time to go back up, we couldn’t find a “less steep“ place. The tide was coming in. The beach was disappearing. We had to walk through the raging surf in order to get around some jagged rocks. We tried a few different places to climb up, and found ourselves on the edge of a cliff too steep to go up, not wanting to go back down. I was certain this was the end, and was willing to sit there until the helicopters came to rescue. But we stayed on the mission, and finally made our way back up, kissing the solid ground when we got there. We took our cold wet sandy clothes off, and drove home naked, listening to ode to joy as we celebrated being alive.
I was doing geological fieldwork with a truck-mounted soil probe in North Dakota, in 1976. Once I was on the Fort Totten Indian Reservation. All of the good land was now owned and farmed by whites, but there was a Lakota community there. I generally camped on unoccupied land. It was getting late and I was getting hungry, so I pulled over to make myself some supper. The area was hilly brush land, with grass, brush and trees. I felt uneasy. There was nobody around; I was not on farmland. I decided to camp there, but moved the truck farther from the road. I set up my tent out of sight behind a little knoll Despite these precautions, which my rational mind told me were totally unnecessary, I became even more uneasy.
I was in my sleeping bag, settling down for the night. I heard a vehicle coming down the road…the first one since I had stopped there. My uneasiness ratcheted up the closer it got; just as it passed, 2 shots rang out. No telling what they hit. The knoll protected me. Immediately I could feel all my dread draining away. I knew they were not coming back.
In 1988, after graduating Northwestern as a classmate of Hal’s, I joined the Peace Corps. I lived for two years in Mwenge village, a four-days drive from Lubumbashi, the Regional Capital of the Shaba Province in Zaire (today: Katanga Region, DRCongo). Those years were thrilling enough (and boring and frustrating; the best and the worst), but for a real thrill I must fast forward more than two decades to the trip I took in 2012 trying to get back to the area where I lived to visit friends.
I flew into Lubumbashi with a Congolese-American friend whose home I could stay at while I tried to find a way up-country. I connected with an assistant to the National Representative from the Mwenge area, and we took a flight to Ankoro, 80km short of the destination. I still didn’t fully understand how we would cover the last 80km. Soon enough we were two motorcycles, 8 people, and assorted baggage in one dugout canoe crossing the Congo River. Then a trip with the “Motards” on a track through the forest to the bush town of Kabalo. A few days later, I made it back to Mwenge for one afternoon of visiting. Thrilling.
Wow hi Hal, this is a LOOOOOOONG story so buckle in…. Ever since I was a little boy I had a passion for music, Little did I know that passion was going to lead to me learning 9 INSTRUMENTS lol. I’ve actually been playing harmonica for 4 years and piano for 9 and the khaen for a few moths, right now I’m learning the mandolin and Jews harp and I’m on my way to a career in music. Fun fact khaen rock 2008 was posted on my birthday! OK back to the story: when I turned 5 was when I realized that music to me was NOT something you could put on paper, you had to hear and and feel it and vibe with it and I especially abide by it now while I’m learning how to play the khaen and I owe you for inspiring me with music and I think you are a fantastic guy and I hope you get well thanks Hal :)
When Hallie was born in 1998, the back third of our yard was a dense forest of brush and unkept pine trees. One day, I decided that I was going to clear it all out to make room for a sand box. It turned into a huge project that’s worthy of it’s very own Saturday Substack, but the part I want to tell here is this. When I cleared all the brush out and removed all the low branches of the pines, we were left with a beautiful canopy of majestic trees with high hanging branches. My next door neighbors, Merl and Barb gave us a really cool mesh infant swing and I hung it from a branch that was about 20 feet up. Hallie loved the thrill of swinging in that swing and I loved the thrill of seeing how high I could get her. She was totally secure in the seat and I would put my whole body into getting her into the sky. I would do anything to go back there for a few minutes and experience the joy that I felt seeing her joy as she sailed through the air.
In 1986, I was living in northern Nicaragua, doing fieldwork for a doctorate in anthropology. The city of Estelí, where I lived, was pretty well defended from the U.S-supported Contras which were attacking civilians, health centers, etc., but the war was raging along the border with Honduras. I worked with the national women’s organization, A.M.N.L.A.E., and a major focus were the northern areas under attack, where families were gathered together from their scattered farms so they could be more easily defended from the Contras. For one week, I rode with soldiers and A.M.N.L.A.E. workers into these remote areas. We traveled along the winding, mountain roads in a military vehicle, their rifles at the ready, every rock or bump causing hearts to jump into throats, as there were land mines everywhere. We heard rifle fire every night as we tried to sleep on hammocks or dirt floors. And yet, witnessing young women and men defending their revolution and trying to improve the lives of their fellow citizens gave to me a kind of deep respect for the human spirit which might be called joy.
In 1965 I was visiting friends in Utah and they decided to take me to Timpanogos Cave. The hike up took 1 1/2 hours. The pathway was sufficiently wide, but on one side the mountain went straight up and on the other it went straight down, with no guardrail and several sharp curves.
Needless to say, it was steep but not too bad for an acrophobic like me because we were looking up.
The cave tour was a fantastically beautiful experience. THEN we had to hike down.
It was very hard to walk, not run, because of how steep the trail was. There were sharp curves that looked out over nowhere. Again, no guardrail. My thigh muscles were aching with exhaustion and just wanted to give up and run. It was as terrifying to hike down as it was as thrilling to hike up and through the caves.
All in all, it was an unforgettable experience.
I love words and love new words but I don't have capacity today ...bedrest, pain , dead weight body and exhaustion ... I know I can be excused here x
Thrilling , exuberant, exhilarating , ecstatic.. life at its finest ... I've had a great life , so so many ecstatic times . Where we meet life at its pinnacle .. where every nerve ending , heart singing , spirit soaring feeling is felt . No room for anything less ..
Health doesn't allow me to have the bigger experiences right now . But what I've learnt ( amongst sooo many things) is the ecstatic is relative it doesn't necessarily need big .
I open a window now and I get a thrill , talk to bug life in the garden and feel great joy , meditate my way to bliss and have a day of low symptoms ..
One of my great joys is the window I often get late evening when I can dance in the bathroom watching myself in the window and pretend I'm on stage 😊
Nov 2010 ...
I'd travelled Bristol to Inverness by plane to go and stay at the Findhorn Spiritual Community on the north east coast of Scotland . One of the largest conscious communities in Europe . Id come to the end of the retreat which was held at Cluny Hill, a very grand and glorious old Victorian spa hotel . Before flying home id decided to stay with a women who lived in a small Scottish cottage on the coast at Findhorn Bay so quaint and sweet . I felt like I was in another world being so far north. I went for a walk along the beach through the sand dunes . I gasped, the beach was covered with pink, green and every colour stone stunning. The air the freshest I'd ever breathed, high on life I lay face down on the beach not a person in sight and completely let go of ,, ... me .
In the evening, I opened my bedroom window to the sound of seals in the water. I walked along the small jetty and out to the northern sky ... The sky oh the sky .. a darkness yet big swirls of pale blue , almost green. The feeling : hard to describe completely free , at one with the world ,.... Not a person in sight ....
It's said the northern lights can be seen from Findhorn the ' aurora polaris' . I think I did not in its full glory ...but an exclusive glory just for me ...
I learned to ski at age 23 at Chestnut Mountain in Galena, IL. I had grown up "outdoorsy" going camping, hiking, biking and canoeing, but my middle class upbringing in South Central Illinois never afforded the chance to go on a ski trip. It never occurred to me there was skiing in the Midwest until I lived in Chicago. I took a youth group from the Chicago suburbs on a ski trip to Galena not knowing what was in store for me. Along with the kids, I got on the slopes and before long I could make turns and go down all the blue runs. All day I kept saying, "Where has this been all my life?" I couldn't believe the thrill of skiing down those (icy) slopes! I learned the "need for speed". Determined to milk every minute out of the day, a few die-hard kids and I skied until 10pm. The last few runs were dicey with solid ice but that didn't deter this newfound love. I began to ski every winter in Wisconsin until I moved to Colorado and became a ski instructor. The thrill of speeding down a slope at night never got old, especially as I learned to ski bigger (black) and longer runs with powdery snow.
I was hiking with some friends at Point Reyes in California. The signs near the cliff said “Do not go near the cliffs. People have died here.” I said “OK” and continued walking. Both Aimee and Steve wanted to go down to the beach. Steve said, “Those signs are just for the tourists. We’re not tourists. Besides, we can find another way up closer to the point that’s not so steep.” So we slid down the side of the cliff as the earth crumbled beneath our feet. The tide was low. On the beach was a herd of sea lions that waddled out to see. Tide pools were full with bright fish and seaweed. It was beautiful. When it was finally time to go back up, we couldn’t find a “less steep“ place. The tide was coming in. The beach was disappearing. We had to walk through the raging surf in order to get around some jagged rocks. We tried a few different places to climb up, and found ourselves on the edge of a cliff too steep to go up, not wanting to go back down. I was certain this was the end, and was willing to sit there until the helicopters came to rescue. But we stayed on the mission, and finally made our way back up, kissing the solid ground when we got there. We took our cold wet sandy clothes off, and drove home naked, listening to ode to joy as we celebrated being alive.
I was doing geological fieldwork with a truck-mounted soil probe in North Dakota, in 1976. Once I was on the Fort Totten Indian Reservation. All of the good land was now owned and farmed by whites, but there was a Lakota community there. I generally camped on unoccupied land. It was getting late and I was getting hungry, so I pulled over to make myself some supper. The area was hilly brush land, with grass, brush and trees. I felt uneasy. There was nobody around; I was not on farmland. I decided to camp there, but moved the truck farther from the road. I set up my tent out of sight behind a little knoll Despite these precautions, which my rational mind told me were totally unnecessary, I became even more uneasy.
I was in my sleeping bag, settling down for the night. I heard a vehicle coming down the road…the first one since I had stopped there. My uneasiness ratcheted up the closer it got; just as it passed, 2 shots rang out. No telling what they hit. The knoll protected me. Immediately I could feel all my dread draining away. I knew they were not coming back.
In 1988, after graduating Northwestern as a classmate of Hal’s, I joined the Peace Corps. I lived for two years in Mwenge village, a four-days drive from Lubumbashi, the Regional Capital of the Shaba Province in Zaire (today: Katanga Region, DRCongo). Those years were thrilling enough (and boring and frustrating; the best and the worst), but for a real thrill I must fast forward more than two decades to the trip I took in 2012 trying to get back to the area where I lived to visit friends.
I flew into Lubumbashi with a Congolese-American friend whose home I could stay at while I tried to find a way up-country. I connected with an assistant to the National Representative from the Mwenge area, and we took a flight to Ankoro, 80km short of the destination. I still didn’t fully understand how we would cover the last 80km. Soon enough we were two motorcycles, 8 people, and assorted baggage in one dugout canoe crossing the Congo River. Then a trip with the “Motards” on a track through the forest to the bush town of Kabalo. A few days later, I made it back to Mwenge for one afternoon of visiting. Thrilling.
Wow hi Hal, this is a LOOOOOOONG story so buckle in…. Ever since I was a little boy I had a passion for music, Little did I know that passion was going to lead to me learning 9 INSTRUMENTS lol. I’ve actually been playing harmonica for 4 years and piano for 9 and the khaen for a few moths, right now I’m learning the mandolin and Jews harp and I’m on my way to a career in music. Fun fact khaen rock 2008 was posted on my birthday! OK back to the story: when I turned 5 was when I realized that music to me was NOT something you could put on paper, you had to hear and and feel it and vibe with it and I especially abide by it now while I’m learning how to play the khaen and I owe you for inspiring me with music and I think you are a fantastic guy and I hope you get well thanks Hal :)
-Dominic ( periboop5 )