#84. What the beautiful demoiselle reminded me about growth, trust, and healing nature photography

What fascinates me about the beautiful demoiselle is that it spends most of its life underwater as a larva. Invisible. Growing in silence. Only later does it emerge and fly along streams and riverbanks. That symbolism has been touching me more and more lately.

What grows first grows in the dark

In the EARTH method, the approach I developed for healing nature photography, we call the moment when you suddenly stop without knowing why Awareness. You react to something in nature before your mind has had the chance to turn it into a story. Only later do you understand what you actually saw. The beautiful demoiselle is such an image. It stops you. And then thinking begins. 

Much of what grows happens beneath the surface. Without being seen. Without clear results or evidence that it is going somewhere. In recent months I have been working intensively on my book about healing nature photography, a card deck, and new collaborations around nature, mental health, and stillness. I am further developing the EARTH method, in which nature experience, photography, slowing down, and conscious presence come together.

That process feels deeply inspiring, while at the same time bringing its own uncertainties. There are practical questions that quietly arise in the background: how do I build a sustainable income around this? How will I eventually fund the book and the card deck? Will this work reach the right people? Questions without immediate answers, which ask me not only to create, but also to trust.

There are moments when everything still feels formless, while at the same time I am already working to make it tangible.

And then there are the moments that remind you why you do this

This week my photography coach read the draft version of my book. The manuscript is far from finished, but she said it already helped her move forward and that she found it hard to put down. Those kinds of responses mean a lot, precisely because the project is still in development.

Recently, one of my photographs was also acquired by a British newspaper. These may seem like small moments. For me, they feel like signals that my work is slowly finding its way.

Nature as more than something beautiful to look at

What I increasingly notice is how many conversations are emerging around rest, nature, and mental health. As if more and more people feel that something is missing in a world that is constantly “on.”

For me, nature photography is becoming less about the landscape itself, and more about what nature does to us. About slowing down. About attention. About learning to see again. About how nature can help us feel a little more space to breathe. I am slowly learning to trust it. That it is already there, even when I cannot yet see it.

Just like the beautiful demoiselle.

Do you recognize this too?

That the most meaningful plans or insights in your life often first had to grow in the shadows before they were ready for the light?