Issue 33 | The Sun Magazine

December 1977

Quotations

Sunbeams

Once we open ourselves, then we land on what is.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Shadow Dancing

The most effective healers combine love and skill. Love puts them in touch with an immeasureable healing power. Love allows a healer to feel, value, and care for the other person’s pain.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Chain Gang

Consumers foot the bill for the supermarket monopolies. And what a bill! A 1975 government report found that 41% of the increase in food margins in a nine-year period was the result of rising advertising and promotional expenses — money spent not to better our diet but to manipulate us as shoppers.

By Cary Fowler
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Breadmen’s

The Rose In The Greasy Fist

I’ll start with a startling admission: in this, The New Age, the closest I come to feeling part of a community is at an all-night cafe just down the block called Breadmen’s.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Beyond Portnoy

Book Review

It is a novel about the nature of temptation itself, in all its guises. Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to resist temptation is to succumb to it, but his witticism contains a truth, because even if we do resist temptation it continues to loom, to grow, as a threat, ever returning, dominating our lives.

By David M. Guy
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Heating With Wood

Heating with wood has become popular as an inexpensive, safe, and personally satisfying way of staying warm. Many people appreciate being able to keep their houses toasty without relying on the utility company or oil industry.

By Hal Richman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Temple Sweeper

12 May 1974. Josh may be dying. It seems so witless and so unreal. I cannot relate to him as other than a living force. Words seem superfluous to the privacy and loneliness of his experience. He is Josh as he always has been; I make clumsy assurances of my love and hope. My suffering for him can only make it harder.

By Val Staples
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

David Searls Loves The Sun

A Romance

I want to hold the Sun-connections of my life up to the light, like a five-inch-tall Italian standing, hands aloft, under a heap of the finest spaghetti. I want to shake the November Sun at the world, and testify like a Baptist in heat.

By David Searls
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hillsborough: Queen Of The Piedmont

According to the Hillsborough Chamber of Commerce, “at least 116 late 18th and early 19th century structures” still grace the town’s quiet streets. Many are beautifully preserved and marked for the passerby.

By Barry Jacobs
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Common Sense As Cosmic Sense

To live by the heart alone is to impose no order on one’s world, to burn out in a frenzy. If one does not temper one’s experience with both logic and feeling, both discernment and love, then one is treading close to the edge of the abyss. The unquestioned heart is as extreme as the unquestioned mind.

By Richard Williams
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Breasts: A Lesson In Self-Discovery

The room temperature should be comfortable but a bit on the cool side to insure the full development of the castle and each of the respective pawns and moats of the areola.

By Frank Graziano
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Excerpts From RAIN

Journal Of Appropriate Technology

RAIN is one of my favorite magazines. Published monthly in Portland, Oregon, RAIN calls itself “a monthly information access journal and reference service for people developing more satisfying patterns that increase local self-reliance and press less heavily on our limited resources.”

By Lee Johnson, Malcolm Wells & Tom Bender
Fiction

On The Astral Plane To Puerto Rico

I, Arthur Milstein, have had a shitty life. I have found difficulty finding gainful employment. I most recently had a position carving names on gravestones, but I was dismissed owing to poor spelling. I usually spell well but not under intense pressure.

By Karl Grossman
Photography

Winter

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

By Priscilla Rich Safransky
Photography

Cartoon By David Terrenoire

The cartoon in this selection is available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

By David Terrenoire