BEAUTY WHISPERS

Sarafin celebrates the natural beauty of Arizona in this debut photography and essay collection.

As a nature photographer and dedicated hiker, the author knows the joys of discovering awe-inspiring sights in the great outdoors. When people specifically search for beauty in nature, she notes, they can’t help but come across something majestic: “Perhaps it is only that we discover what we are seeking when we are totally focused on it,” writes Sarafin, “and if our civilized world is always distracting us then how are we ever to discover the riches of the Great Mystery presented to us on a daily basis?” This book collects many amazing images that Sarafin captured on film during her travels through the deserts of Arizona, including depictions of birds, animals, plants, landscapes, and rock faces adorned with ancient petroglyphs. She often captions the photos with inspirational sayings from such famous figures as Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Emily Dickinson, and Henri Matisse. The book also includes 10 single-page essays describing some of her favorite encounters, such as a time when she stopped to play her cedar flute by a pond and saw that the fish had formed a perfect circle, apparently in reaction to the music. Sarafin’s prose is conversational but animated by a spiritual love of nature, as when she describes a chance meeting with a lizard “doing that little up and down motion that lizards do. I call it dancing—and they call it announcing/defending their territory.” The photos, however, remain the highlight of the book, and some of them are quite striking. In the end, though, the volume has an inescapable scrapbooklike feel, and the typeface, quotes, and diaristic essays give the work a thrown-together quality that may put off some readers. Those who know the Arizona landscape may be a bit more intrigued, but in general, the book feels too personal to inspire more than a vague desire to go on a hike—and perhaps learn to play the cedar flute.

An earnest but somewhat slapdash book of nature images.