Issue 18 | The Sun Magazine
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Morning After

This head so gently aches; its bloodshot blur is the morning vision. “Higher” consciousness always takes its toll. Well, I did yoga twice yesterday and only had five scoops of Bob’s Homemade last night. Am I healthy because I didn’t get the flu last week?

By Stewart Walker
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

She Would Have Been A Taxi Dancer, But He Couldn’t Hail A Cab

Book Review

Manning demonstrates a rather considerable talent for manipulating vocabulary and for wringing every ounce of nuance possible from a word or phrase.

By Dee Dee Small
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Prayer

Prayer is an action, a strong action in a positive direction, a lifeline to pull us out of our own despair.

By Judith
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Massage

Through massage my mind relaxes, the energy flows smoothly; tensions which are encased in my body are released, and the love flows through me.

By Farra Allen & Libby Allen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Palm Healing

Massage is not the only medical application of the hand. Another useful practice (which can be performed with immediate results) involves the combination of touch with chanting to stimulate and balance various energy centers in the body, inducing a state of centeredness and meditative tranquility.

By Robert Donnan
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Maitri – Space Awareness

The Life And Death Of The Ego

The Maitri program was developed by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. The program is designed to nurture compassion through participation in a meditative community.

By Marvin Casper
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Therapies: Choose The Right One

If you desire assistance and relief from the concerns, confusions, or pain of your life, select the person who will be most effective in helping you. . . . A brief overview of a few psychotherapeutic orientations follows.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Channel One

Getting Well

The meaning of life is usually contained in an awareness and appreciation of the process of life. The pleasure that I increasingly experience gives me the strength and trust to know I am moving through moments in the right way.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Suicide Notes For Suckers From The Would-Be Inferno

We are living in the exaggerations of our memories of the future. These are HISTORICAL TIMES.

Medea (Rob Brezsny)
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Taking The Cure

Throughout history plants have been the primary medicine used to treat physical and psychological illness. Many people are returning to nature as their primary healer, finding the approach of Western medicine often ineffective and expensive.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Long Ride Into The Sunset

So it is that my attention is drawn to Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as they go through their spirited bicentennial hustles in an effort to become top banana.

By William Gaither
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Poetry: From The Factory

Poetry, like all the arts, has taken a turn toward the diffuse since World War 2. By diffuse, I mean the opposite of the exactness that went into the work of the masters, the pointedness of a strong sensibility.

By Richard Williams
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Kind Word About Coffee

One legend gives the credit to Kaldi, a goatherd in Ethiopia. One day in 850 A.D. Kaldi noticed his goats, after feeding on the berries of a certain evergreen bush, began to act strangely. Enough so to make Kaldi try the beans himself.

By Mike Barefoot
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Another Appetite

There’s a cool, shady corner in the kitchen. That’s where I raise a simple crop that’s not dependent on sparse rain clouds or my depleted compost pile. Sprouts: lentils and alfalfa are best. Mung beans are pretty good, soy beans, too.

By Judy Bratten
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

You Eat It

Is there a right way to eat? Is there a wrong way to write about it? I’ll take the second question first. I’ve got an apple in one hand, a pen in the other, and my mouth is moving as fast as my mind. Is this as bad as talking with your mouth full, or is it the boldest kind of personal journalism?

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Seymour Dueless Says

The rain has run me out of the garden where I was trying to catch up on my weeding, and into the house, to this. Another written thing.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Be True To Your Teeth Or They’ll Be False To You

It is a common misconception that we are more healthy than our great grandparents due to progress in the medical profession. For example, the epidemic of tooth decay (the most prevalent form of all human diseases) is relatively recent and is a clear indication of our physical degeneration.

By Priscilla Rich Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Well Of Being

Yoga, Breathing And Meditation

Being well, what can we call it? Freedom from physical disturbance, from illness, or from psychological tensions? Is it freedom from illusion and self-imposed limitation? Well-being probably encompasses all of these interrelated conditions as well as others whose reality is unmet as of yet.

By Gayle Garrison
Fiction

Fortune Cookies

I was looking up monasteries in the yellow pages when she knocked. I was living at this time in Jersey City, N.J., on top of a meat market. It was the dingiest of places. I got up from my fleabitten couch. I opened the door to a dazzling darkhaired woman.

By Karl Grossman
Fiction

Three Stories

It was a dismally beautiful afternoon. In fact, it was so beautiful that Samantha wondered if it would ever end. The trees were so green, the light green that only early spring can offer.

By Richard Williams