Hey, it’s been a minute.

More than a minute, actually. Over a month. You noticed, or you didn't, and either way that's okay.

Here's the honest version…

Work’s been a weird thing for the past few years. Getting canned from a job I never really sought but dearly loved hurt in many ways. Then AI ate the marketing writing business I’d had for 20 years, leaving my little team also looking for work. I’d applied for hundreds of jobs in the copywriting world - nada.

Got an opportunity to take a six-month foray into high-ticket sales closing, a wonderful learning experience. According to the sales team manager, I was really good at it - delivered the highest ROI on ad spend (i.e. ads > call bookings > sales) he’d ever seen. 

But commission-only sales isn’t exactly reliable income. My stress levels were through the roof. 

Bandwidth became scarce, both time- and energy-wise. I can’t remember any other time I’d ever reached the point of, “Literally not one more thing can fit on this plate” like this.

I was head-down in survival mode for a while, making the now-obvious decision that one entrepreneurial endeavor is plenty: Wild Woods Retreat & Farm. And that it was time to get a day job. At 58 years old. After 21 years as a business owner, with periodic forays into W2 land when something really cool came my way.

So, what happened?

Well, I got a job. It’s cool. Not writing, strategy, or marketing, none of the ways I’ve made a living before. At least, not on the surface. 

I’m running administrative and systems coordination for a non-profit. Translation: solving puzzles, building systems, unknotting knots. You know, in the world of entrepreneurs: a Tuesday.

It’s feeling good to serve and get paid. Bandwidth is starting to come back.

I'm not going to pretend I'm back in full force, because I'm not. The mojo is still returning slowly, like circulation coming back to a limb that fell asleep. What I do have is a massive backlog of podcast episodes I promised to publish, and the feature stories that go with them. Sara Lindström's is first. 

So that's what this is. Not a comeback. Just a promise kept.

If you've stuck around, thank you. Genuinely.

I'll be in the woods if you need me.

Sue

Sara Lindström was somewhere on a Costa Rican beach when it hit her. Not a wave. Clarity. The kind that doesn't knock politely. Photography. Travel. Nature. Wild places. Wild people.

She was broke. She was happy. Those two things, for once, didn't seem to be in conflict.

One year later, a travel company called. They wanted her to photograph destinations around the world. The wild, improbable plan worked.

Of course it did.

For years, Sara was that photographer. The one travel companies sent to make destinations look irresistible. And for a while, it was great. She was doing what she loved, getting paid, seeing the world.

Then she started noticing something uncomfortable.

The places she was sent to photograph were already overrun. Already discovered. Already filtered to death on every social media platform known to humanity. Crowds everywhere. That magic quality she was supposed to capture? Hard to find in a sea of selfie sticks.

So she asked herself a real question: what was she actually contributing with her photographs? The answer was not flattering.

So she pivoted. Hard.

Here is the part nobody expects. Sara, a nomadic artist who had been to every continent and had zero interest in slowing down, got trapped in Sweden during COVID. She had been on assignment in Spain when the world locked down. Getting home was complicated. Spain was strict. It was not a fun time.

But she made it back to the far north of Sweden. The place she grew up. The place she could not wait to leave. The place she had spent years deliberately escaping.

And she fell in love with it.

The forests. The silence. The glacial light. The reindeer, which are apparently stunning and we have to take her word for it. With no obligations and no crowds, Sara finally stopped rushing past the place she had overlooked her whole life. It was extraordinary.

What she built from that rediscovery is now a business that runs immersive retreats in wild places around the world, branding photography for nature-rooted women entrepreneurs, private coaching, and a book in progress.

The girl who ran from Sweden came back and built something worth returning to.

Sara's work looks like photography. I mean, it is photography. But that's not really what's happening.

When retreat leaders, coaches, and visionaries hire Sara, they are not just hiring a camera operator. They are hiring someone who helps them see themselves. Fully. Honestly. Without the stiff-shouldered, awkward-smile energy that shows up in a studio.

Sara captures people in their natural element. Sometimes that means windswept Nordic coastlines. Sometimes it's Tuscany, British Columbia, or Patagonia. Wherever the wild is, that's where Sara goes.

Her Arctic Sweden retreats gather around eight women at a time. Forest lodge. Mountain lodge. Hiking. Breathwork. Guided meditation envisioning a dream life. Aurora photography under the night sky. Saunas and cold plunges. Campfire sisterhood. The whole magnificent thing.

She's planning retreats in British Columbia and Patagonia. She has been to every continent. Mongolia is still on the list.

Here is what the grind crowd doesn't want you to know. Exhausted people take terrible photos, make bad decisions, and miss the whole point.

Sara is out in nature every single day. Not as a hobby. Not as a treat she schedules between meetings. As a baseline requirement for being a functioning human with good ideas.

Her office is a forest. Her brainstorming sessions happen on kayaks. Her clarity comes from silence, not from another productivity hack or morning routine optimized for output.

"You've got to slow down to speed up," she says. Simple. True. Basically impossible to argue with.

The women who come on Sara's retreats often struggle with the silence at first. They are not used to it. We have collectively trained ourselves to fill every available quiet moment with noise, notifications, and something. For some of Sara's guests, real wilderness silence is genuinely disorienting.

And then something shifts. Shoulders drop. Eyes soften. Inspiration arrives, uninvited and uncomplicated.

This is not a coincidence. It's what nature actually does when you stop treating it like a backdrop and start letting it be the thing itself.

Sara's tips for getting outdoors and actually benefiting from it are refreshingly free of gear recommendations and Instagram aesthetics.

Walk in the forest. No podcast. No phone. No earbuds. Just the sound of things that existed before we invented all the noise. Go kayaking if you have access to water. Ski in winter. Try macro photography, because when you are that close to the world, you stop skimming across the surface of it and start actually seeing it.

"There's beauty everywhere. We just need to slow down enough to see it."

She also notes, matter-of-factly, that silence is going extinct. She is not wrong. Getting outside and into actual quiet is less a luxury and more a small, necessary act of resistance against the permanent noise we have all somehow agreed to live inside.

Just do it more, she says. Do it more often.

That's it. That's the advice.

Sara Lindström works with women whose brands live in the wild. She shoots retreats, leads adventures, and photographs visionaries in the landscapes that match who they actually are. If you are ready to be seen, on your terms, in your element, Sara is your person.

Find her at: saralinstromphotography.com

Instagram: @saralinstromphotography

Our conversation is…

On YouTube

And Spotify