SALE TITLES-- 1/2 off w/purchase of full-price book: Sarah Leen -- True North

Iceland. It felt like coming home. Though I had never been there before. At least not in this lifetime. 

Yet it was so utterly familiar and right. 

My true north. A fixed point in a spinning world. 

That rough beauty, the black sand, the soft moss green, the basalt cliffs, the glacial blue, the volcanos alive and giving birth to new land. The transparent ice. A land spare and scoured. Fire and ice. 

It is Eden to me. Where it all began and is yet still being born. Primeval. Essential. Dark. 

The distances make room for you. Hold you so easily. You can ‘stay the moment.’ Life stretches into a sense of the eternal. I laid back on the soft northern tussocks of grass and moss, the rushing water, the loud silence and slipped out of time. 

My old Viking soul was stirred and saw the sagas come alive. 

It was a yes. Yes, I know this land in my bones, yes, I am somehow connected to this place, and yes, I will return. 

Sarah Leen is the director of photography at National Geographic, and a former photographer for the magazine. You can follow her on Instagram @roseleen