(This is one of my favorite photos of me. I’m at Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine. Sitting there, I felt the most peace I’ve ever felt. It’s the place I go to in my mind during EMDR and hard life moments, what my therapist calls “my safe place.”)

Nature takes me to a place of deep, honest introspection that I find difficult to go to around people and, quite frankly, when I look in the mirror.

I’m always trying to capture what I learn in nature with the lens of my camera.

I prefer to be near the ocean. I love its ever-changing attitude. Fearless. Calm. Angry. Playful. Romantic. Not fully understood. Some places deep. Some places shallow. It is what it has to be. It is what it wants to be. The ocean is me.

We can see in nature what we’re afraid to see in and admit about ourselves.

If I can’t get to an ocean, I’ll go to a park, where I can watch plants and creatures grow and change with the seasons. A photo I took of a tree in a park inspired an essay I wrote: The Leaning Tree.

Like nature, our lives are seasons. Spring brings newness and growth. Summer brings all things good: light and warmth. Autumn brings a harvest for all you’ve sown. I want those seasons to last forever. But in each season, I’m always bracing for winter. Winter always comes eventually. Winter is harsh and bitter and feels like it will never ever end.

Sometimes I manipulate what I see in nature, like a photo I took of a firework shooting up into the sky on the 4th of July. I captured it at a slow speed, altered the color settings in Photoshop, and rotated the image. Now it reminds me of the ocean. Sky becomes sea.

Nature gives us a fresh way of seeing and imaging things to recreate ourselves and create new worlds.

© All text and images by Lisa Fipps. Do not copy or print any part of the text or photos without written permission from the author.