I have stood on sea ice at the edge of the world and felt, very clearly, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Not because I was brave. Not because I had the right gear or the right credentials or had earned it in some measurable way. But because something in me – something older than language – recognized the place.
That is what the North does. It simply waits, vast and unhurried, and asks you to slow down enough to feel what is actually happening inside you and around you.
I have been chasing that feeling for most of my adult life.
When the noise falls away
I spent nineteen months overwintering in the high Arctic of Svalbard. What that kind of silence teaches you is pretty humbling. Extreme environments don’t make you heroic; they just make you honest. They strip away the performance of courage and leave you with the quieter, harder kind: the courage of choosing presence over bravado or distraction. Sometimes I wonder why we need to travel so far away only to come back “home.”
But that is what wild places offer, whether the setting is ice or open ocean. They hand you back to yourself. One thought and feeling at a time.
Different expressions of the same wild truth
Scotland. Iceland. The Faroe Islands. Svalbard. Greenland.
They are not the same place. But they are, I think, different expressions of the same wild truth – that the North holds something the modern world is rapidly forgetting. Slowness. Scale. A landscape that is genuinely indifferent to your inbox or your to-do lists.
In Scotland, you feel it in the weight of the mist on the Highlands and the way ancient paths seem to know where they are going even when you don’t.
In Iceland, it arrives as you stand at the edge of a thermal pool or a lava field and realize the earth beneath you is still wildly alive and it’s still making itself.
In the Faroe Islands, it comes from the wind itself. There is no explaining the Faroe Islands to someone who hasn’t felt that wind. You just have to go.
In Svalbard, where I will be this June co-hosting a voyage with Wild Women Expeditions, it arrives at the ice edge – where the ocean meets what remains of the pack ice – and it is both beautiful and sobering. I have watched that ice edge change over many years. I know what movement means. And I know that standing at it, watching it, feeling it in your body does something to a person that no documentary or dataset can fully replicate.
In Greenland, at the heart of the Arctic, Arctic small ship expeditions bring you face to face with a scale that shifts something—The ice sheet. The fjords. The small settlements dotted with colour and beautiful souls.
Research on transformative travel is increasingly confirming what many of us already know intuitively: time in wild nature doesn’t just refresh us – it reconnects us. It dissolves the illusion that we are separate from the living world. The question shifts, quietly but permanently, from what can I get out of this to how do I belong here. Connection leads to care. Care leads to action. And it all begins with simply showing up and paying attention.
What wild places actually teach you
I am often asked what polar exploration and Arctic small ship expeditions have taught me. People usually expect an answer about endurance, cold, or logistics in extreme terrain.
But here’s what I really want to say – what I said recently on a podcast that felt less like an interview and more like a long walk with a thoughtful friend: turn off the news. Just for a little while. Step outside your door – wherever that door opens and look at something you’ve never looked at carefully before.
Use your beginner mind. That open, curious, undefended way of seeing that children have, and that adults forget they’re allowed to use.
We are all so busy consuming the world that we forget to inhabit it. Your backyard, your neighbourhood, the faces of people you pass – they are all worthy of your full attention. And the wild places – the ice edges and cliff tops and open seas — they are the places that remind you most forcefully that inhabiting the world is the whole point.
Extreme environments don’t give you answers. They give you better questions. They make you honest. And in my experience, they do this most powerfully in the company of other women who came not to perform, but to feel.
That is the gift. In the ice, on water, in mist, in wind – the geography changes, but the gift is the same.
Why I keep going back — and why I think you should come
I have spent more nights in a tent on ice than I can count. And yet every time I go north – wherever that might be – I find something new. Not because the landscape has changed, but because I have. It asks me to bring whatever I’ve become since the last time.
If something in you is tugging northward – quietly, persistently, beneath the noise of your busy life – follow it. The way you’d follow any pull toward water, movement, wild air, and the company of brave women. Not all adventures shout. Some whisper. The ones that whisper tend to be the ones that last.
One more thing. At Plum Village Monastery in France, I sat with an idea that has stayed with me. There are three kinds of truth: historical truth – the dates, the temperatures, the facts. Conventional truth – the lived stories, the data, the science. And the ultimate truth – interbeing: the reality that nothing exists alone.
When we forget that last one, we lose our sense of agency. We tell ourselves the problems are too big, too far away. But every choice ripples outward. The question isn’t whether we have agency. It’s whether we use it for healing or for harm.
The north has a way of making that question feel urgent – and answerable.
Explore The Arctic
Wild Women Expeditions is currently offering limited-time savings on select Arctic small ship expeditions —making it a great moment to finally book the journey that’s been sitting on your list. For 2026 departures, you can save up to 25% on select trips—but only until April 3rd. If your plans are a little further out, there are also savings of up to 25% on select 2027 departures.
And if you’re curious about what’s coming next, I popped in to a recent webinar on their new 2027 Arctic small ship expeditions—an inspiring look at what it’s like to travel to some of the most remote and breathtaking places on the planet.
