In 2016, Lisette Morales McCabe suddenly became very ill and needed emergency surgery.
She was confined to her bed, recovering, for three months. As soon as she could leave the house, she knew she wanted to be in nature.
“So instinctively, I just went one day to the Everglades with some friends and just walking in there, being in there, It just felt really healing,” Morales said. “Healing because it makes me feel really good about myself. It makes me feel connected because going through an illness. I feel disconnected. I feel disconnected from my body for many months.”
Connecting with nature, she says, did not come naturally to her. A lifelong artist, she had recently turned her creative energy toward photography. And that helped her understand how she could connect with nature.
“And then I realized that for me, it really just simply meant just to walk, being mindful, being quiet and just, you know, deep listening, and just trying to be present, trying, you know, to slow down the mind, and trying to observe, and that's how I feel that the Everglades has started to show up, show its beauty,” said Morales McCabe.
And that beauty is all throughout her new book, which she titled “The Pulse of Nature: Spirituality in the Florida Swamps.” It’s a slim, soft-covered book containing 29 lush, stunning photos. She shot at Six Mile Cypress Slough, Fakahatchee Strand, and Naples beaches. She even went into ancestral Miccosukee territory in the Everglades to photograph with her friend Betty Osceola, a member of the Miccosukee tribe. Morales McCabe brings the nature to us through her camera.
It was after Hurricane Ian came through Naples, where she lives, that she sorted through all her photography work to back it up. She realized she had the makings of a book. To make it as accessible as possible, she decided to self-publish it, and gear it toward young adult readers. She didn’t want it to be a precious, untouchable coffee table book of photographs.
“I was thinking if it is for young adults, it’s going to be in a different area in the bookstore and in the library,” said Morales McCabe. “And that's what I would like my book to be, where young people can go, instead of being a photography book under that category, which will be into all of those big, fancy, beautiful books, and maybe it will get swallowed by all those beautiful books. And maybe young people wouldn't have access to that. But if it will be placed in an area of young adults, they could find it. And so that's, that's how the book came about.”
Most of all, Morales McCabe says, she would like the book to help other people get out into nature and make their own connection.
“The idea of this book is that I want it to be an invitation to visit nature, just to go outdoors and to go and find your own connection, whatever that looks like. My friend Houston Cypress, from Love the Everglades Movement, he instilled that idea in me, that is it is really important to find your own connection in nature. Whatever it looks like,” she said.
To get the book, go to the author’s website, LisetteMorales.com.
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