🌙 To the Moon — and Back to What Matters Most
When I was ten years old, I told my teacher I wanted to go to the moon.
She didn't laugh. She handed me a piece of paper and said, “Write NASA a letter.” So I did. A few weeks later, a form letter arrived in return- encouraging, a little generic, urging me to stay in school.
I never made it to the moon. But years later I found myself skiing across Antarctica, moving through a landscape so vast and white and silent that it genuinely looked otherworldly-like the surface of the moon. I’ve thought about that a lot - how dreams don’t always arrive in the shape we imagined.
The lesson I carry from that ten-year-old with her NASA letter: Your dream is still alive. It’s just wearing different boots.
⏳. The Most Precious Resource
I’ve been sitting with a beautiful piece of writing by my friend Jake Haupert ( CEO Transformational Travel Council) - a reflection on sending his son off into his own big life, and all the feelings that come with those moments of threshold. You can read it here. If you’re a parent, or an aunt, or an uncle, or anyone who has watched someone young step out the door toward their future, I suspect it will land for you.
I don’t have kids of my own, but I’ve lived those milestones through my nieces and nephews. First days of school, first adventures, first times they dealt with losing something or someone. There’s a particular kind of love in that. And a particular kind of ache. The ache of feeling like there is just never enough time. Not time in the abstract, not productivity or optimization or how many things we can cram into a day.
Time as the actual currency of a life. What we do with it. Who we spend it on. Whether we really show up when we’re there.
One of the things I’ve noticed - and this might be uncomfortable to hear, because it makes me a little uncomfortable too - is how rarely we ask each other how we’re actually doing. Not the surface version. The real version.
Travel strips that away. Something about being out of your regular context, on a boat, on a train or on foot in some remote place, makes people more honest. The masks come off. You sit around a fire or a galley table and people say the things they don’t usually say. I’ve had some of the most meaningful conversations of my life in those moments.
I know not everyone is ready to go there. Some people prefer to keep things lighter, and that’s genuinely fine - they’ll let you know, kindly, if you reach in that direction. But for those who are ready, the invitation is worth extending. Ask. Listen. Be patient with the answer.
Family and Friends - Happiest together on the water -whale watching- Vancouver Island, BC Canada
🤍 On Sisters, and the Band of Women Who Get You
I’m the kind of lucky that I don’t take lightly: I have my sister Bettina. We don’t have to explain ourselves to each other. We can feel when something is off, even when we’re thousands of kilometres apart. That kind of knowing is rare and I never stop being grateful for it. Not everyone has it - sometimes it’s a sister by blood, sometimes by choice. But if you have someone in your life like that, you know exactly what I mean.
And then there’s the wider band. The gal pals. The women who show up, who make you cry-laugh at dinner, who drive through the night to be with you, who say the right thing at exactly the right moment. Some of my most memorable experiences on this earth have happened in the company of a group of women just deciding to go somewhere and be fully present for it.
đź§. Which is a natural segue - because I am genuinely not shy about this - to Wild Women Expeditions.
I’ve been the Polar Ambassador for WWE for a while now, and I’ll keep sharing what they have coming because I believe in it. The expeditions they run create exactly the kind of time and space I’m talking about. You go somewhere extraordinary. You do hard things alongside other women. You come home different and as a result see things with a fresh perspective.
Their 2027 small ship Arctic season is shaping up beautifully. Here’s what’s on offer:
• Svalbard Explorer: High Arctic Norway - June 18–28, 2027. East Greenland: Stories of Ice & Light - July 20–Aug 2, 2027
• Baffin Island & Greenland: Midnight Sun -Aug 14–25, 2027 Ellesmere Island & North Greenland - Aug 19–31, 2027
• High Arctic Expedition - Aug 31–Sep 14, 2027. Greenland and Wild Labrador — Sep 26–Oct 10, 2027
You can browse the full list and register your interest here. Or use this link: https://hubs.li/Q046Mdmc0. And stay tuned - there’s an upcoming webinar on these Arctic destinations that I’ll be sharing details on soon.
You will not regret showing up for yourself in the company of other women. I never have.
‍ ‍ Sisters - Bettina & Sunniva
🌿. Jane Goodall Day, and a Big Announcement on the Horizon
April 3rd is now officially Jane Goodall Day — recognized as a day of action rather than commemoration, an invitation to carry forward the practices and values she’s spent her life modeling. Start small. Stay attentive. Build change through accumulation. Act where you are, with what you have.
The Jane Goodall Institute has initiatives everyone can get involved in — please take a look if you’re searching for somewhere to direct your energy.
I also have my own big announcement tied to this, inspired by Jane Goodall Day and asking myself “what can I do to get more involved ?” I’m not quite ready to share it yet. But I’m close. Stay with me. It has to do with Vancouver Island 2027.
🌍. One More Thing About Space - and Earth
The Artemis launch has me thinking about something that comes up a lot in the organizations I’m part of - the Explorers Club among them. There’s enormous fascination with space, and I understand it. It is, literally, out there. Incomprehensibly vast. The ultimate frontier. So many questions and the utter excitement that comes from seeking answers.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: there are equally extraordinary discoveries happening right here on Earth. In the oceans. In the ice. In the forest understories and the tidal zones and the places we haven’t yet looked carefully enough. The people I work alongside are doing some of the most remarkable science and exploration of our time - and most of the world doesn’t know their names. Every year a new cohort of Explorers Club 50 is selected- people changing our world and our understanding of it- check out the most recent group of changemakers from around the world for 2026.
Maybe the space story can be a catalyst for that. Maybe looking up, collectively, can remind us to also look around.
And maybe - if we’re lucky - it can remind us to look at each other. To ask how things are really going. To put down the phone, to carve out the time, to be in the room fully with the people we love.
That ten-year-old with the NASA letter didn’t make it to the moon. But she skied across Antarctica. She’s been to the top of the world and back. She’s still going. Keep believing in yours. They’re closer than you think.
Thanks for taking your time to read this , Sunniva xx
