I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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A special section featuring Michelle Alexander, Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, Ram Dass, Ani DiFranco, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ross Gay, Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, and others.
Our subscriber list has grown far beyond what it was then; we now have seventy-two thousand names on it. The staff is larger. The look of the magazine may have changed, but its content hasn’t traveled far from its roots. It continues to explore those big, unwieldy themes, offering glimpses of the mysterious and maddening and magnificent experiences that connect us.
The illustration that is now part of our logo appears for the first time on the cover of issue 9, which came out in June 1975. The artist, Tom Cleveland, took inspiration from a face on a tarot card and added a monocle for a whimsical touch. The back cover of the issue features a photo of a tree and a quote by Richard Brautigan: “I wonder whether what we are publishing now is worth cutting down trees to make paper for the stuff.”
To mark THE SUN’s tenth anniversary, we sent postcards to everyone we could remember who had ever been involved with the magazine — at least everyone for whom we had an address — asking, “What are you doing now, and what does THE SUN mean, or what has it meant, to you?”
Here’s a box of our best: some of the most interesting words we’ve printed about love and relationship over the past eight years — some of it’s nutty, some of it’s bittersweet, maybe you’ll find the cherry.
What is the body? Is the brain a biological mechanism that "creates” consciousness, or rather the manifestation of something beyond — and perhaps the source of — the physical?