Topics | Happiness | The Sun Magazine #2

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Happiness

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Guide To Home Acceptance

“Home improvement” always entails physically fixing up one’s house. But what about the emotional work of homeownership? One way to improve your home is through gratitude and acceptance. Does everything constantly need to be “fixed”?

By Sparrow April 2022
Readers Write

Cooking

With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island

By Our Readers April 2022
Photography

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Photograph By Wendy Stone April 2022
Poetry

More Of This, Please

In grad school I had a writing teacher who’d completely cream my essays. / Cross-outs and tracked changes. He took me at my word / when I said I wanted to get better.

By Emily Sernaker March 2022
Readers Write

Concerts

At Woodstock, at a school in Nepal, at an all-ages punk show

By Our Readers March 2022
Poetry

The Cardinal Reminds Me

It sweeps and arcs across my path / almost every day on my walk to the cafe, / under sun or cloud, its red / seeming lit from inside, a brightness / bold as the lipstick my mother wore

By Andrea Potos February 2022
Poetry

Fifteen Strokes Of Luck

The first was that I was no longer in pain; I could sleep. / The second was that I was finally able to love: all my life I had been more or less shut. / The third was that I lived near a pond. Watching the mallards dunk made me laugh. I was happy looking at dragonflies and even their empty exoskeletons, their shells shaking a little in the wind.

By Ellery Akers October 2021
Quotations

Sunbeams

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. . . . I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

Rachel Naomi Remen

October 2021
Quotations

Sunbeams

For almost everyone the notion of home is usually a positive one. It is the known as opposed to the unknown; it is certainty as opposed to uncertainty. . . . It is the familiar and predictable. Better that than the unknown, the unpredictable, with a stranger imposing strange ways. It is also the primordial sense of the need for security, of being held, of belonging.

Stephen Shaw

September 2021
Readers Write

Sisters

The kind you’re born with, the kind you choose, the kind that teach Catholic school

By Our Readers September 2021