Meeting women who travel makes me feel strong, confident, and joyous.

In the last ten days, I've met four amazing Traveling Huntresses. All solo travelers from different nations, each with beauty, brains, and a courageous spirit. They ranged in age, but shared a similar quality: an openness and willingness to connect and share a piece of who they are with me along our journeys.

Meeting women while traveling feels like meeting reflections of myself in different forms. I find this both inspiring and affirming. I don't feel like I'm traveling alone when I meet them, and sometimes, for a day or two, I'm not. I get to share time with someone who reciprocates my interest in meaningful conversations, funny anecdotes, and insightful perspectives on current events and the world around us.

There is something about meeting women who travel solo that makes me feel as though something is going right in the world. Even when the news and social media provide endless reminders of misogyny and violence against women, I see reasons to remain hopeful. Despite the disparities and inequalities that still exist, we're motivated to make our own way, create paths for others, protect one another, and provide safe spaces wherever we can.

We meet on the road, and there is something beautiful about the way we receive one another: the way we speak, listen, and make room for a conversation. It's a kind of engagement I haven't always experienced in my interactions with men.

For example, many of the men I've encountered on the road have seemed unapproachable. They might speak to you with their arms crossed, give you half an ear, or remain more attentive to their surroundings than to the person in front of them. My experience with women has often been different. They're present, engaged, watching you, listening to you. There's a certain attentiveness that makes it easier to connect.

Of course, not every woman I meet is looking to make a new friend. Some encounters feel like reconnecting with a good friend I haven't seen in a while. Others leave me thinking that this person could become a potential business partner or collaborator for a good cause. And there are women who give off the impression that they're not particularly interested in making connections at all. Still, I've experienced more goodwill than cold shoulders in my travels.

When I first started thinking of The Traveling Huntress as a brand, I didn't really have a clear picture of who that woman was. Over these last four years, however, she has begun to reveal herself through roommates, new acquaintances, work colleagues, and seatmates on various forms of transport. I can see her so much more clearly now.

I am she, and she is me.

We have plenty in common, and yet our stories have their own variations. We aren't all compatriots, but we come from nations that share similar challenges. We discuss these experiences and realize that we're not alone in our fears, hopes, disappointments, or desires for a better world.

The beauty of women who travel solo is that they understand, in one way or another, how the world can try to limit their choices, possibilities, and points of view, to keep them small, well-kept, and boxed in. And yet, each of us is still willing to take the risk of venturing somewhere far beyond the security and familiarity of home.

It's funny: I sometimes think about astrology's fourth house, traditionally associated with home, family, and our roots. I wonder whether we're meant to expand our understanding of that house, to imagine it as something much larger and more welcoming than we have been taught to see it.

Perhaps we're not only creating an ideal hearth and home for the families we have yet to know, but also creating a more secure sense of belonging for ourselves. We're learning to recognize that the places we come from may have had rather humble or limited expectations of us. We may have been taught to take care of our own, but if we allow our minds to expand and travel far enough, often enough, we discover that our own extends much further than the family we're born into or the one we create through marriage.

And perhaps that's one of the most beautiful things about meeting women along the way. We begin to recognize that a sense of belonging doesn't have to be confined to one place, one culture, or one family. Sometimes, we find it in one another.

A Few Things to Reflect On

  1. How do you receive or relate to other women you meet on your travels?

  2. What makes meeting other women who travel exciting or a profound experience for you?

  3. When was the last time you met another woman with whom you connected almost immediately? What made that connection feel so natural?