Mark Potter, a former NBC News correspondent, has been making people smile on Instagram with the beautiful pictures that he's been taking of sunrises.
For the past four years, Potter would get up early to capture Mother Nature at her most pristine. Although it's been a therapeutic experience for Potter, he explained he started this hobby as a way to cope with wife Judith's ovarian cancer before her death.
"She’s the reason that I’m here," he said during an interview with NBC's Kerry Sanders on Saturday TODAY.
After Potter retired in 2016, doctors diagnosed his wife with ovarian cancer.
"In the course of cancer care, I started to become exhausted. I got overtired, anxious, fearful that I was losing my wife. And my wife suggested, 'If you’re going to survive this cancer that you're trying to help me with, you need to get out of the house every so often.'"
And that was exactly what Potter did. Since he would spend 14 hours a day taking care of Judith, he decided to use his free time in the mornings to look at the sunrise.
That was when he noticed that Mother Nature could be "healing" for him.
"Symbolically for me, it was a new beginning, it was a chance to start over, a chance to see something beautiful every day," he said about the sunrise. "It was the start of my path towards healing."
Once Potter started posting pictures of his sunrise journey on Facebook and Instagram, he noticed that he was getting a lot of great feedback on his work.
“And that’s the part that really healed me: when people started responding to my photographs, telling me that they made them feel better," he said.
Potter has since turned his work into a book, "Sunrise: A Photographic Journey of Comfort, Healing, and Inspiration," which he dedicated to Judith.
In the book's foreword, Potter wrote, "The sun will always rise, no matter how we feel or what we have done the night before. And when it does, the darkness becomes light.”