Issue 512 | The Sun Magazine

August 2018

Readers Write

Taking Your Time

A flat tire, a rescue cat, a winter in Antartica

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

August 2018

Featuring Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

Two Mirrors Facing Each Other

One does not sit in order to become enlightened. One sits because, as the Buddha exclaimed at the moment of his awakening, one is enlightened as one is. The practice is simply a means of realizing this fact, which the ordinary, dualistic mind obscures.

By Lawrence Shainberg
Quotations

Sunbeams

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

R.H. Blyth

The Sun Interview

Our Grand Delusion

Norman Fischer On The Tyranny Of The Self

We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.

By Corey Fischer
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Boy

When my brother was twelve, I found six mice nailed to the wall of the abandoned tree house in the woods near our apartment. He spent a lot of time there. It seemed to me the little mouse faces were frozen in agony. As though they’d been alive when he’d hammered the nails through them.

By J. Mays
Fiction

Waiting For My Rape

This man could have been my rapist, but he looked too nice. He had thick, wavy hair, like a movie star from the seventies, and a jawbone that could take out your eye. I hung my feet over the edge of the roof and let myself slide into his arms.

By Jessica Anya Blau
Fiction

Beneath Our Feet

Well, if the world handed me strangeness, then I’d take whatever advantage I could, which meant walking right down the middle of a street usually clogged with traffic. There was luxury in the freedom to roam as I pleased.

By Redfern Jon Barrett
Photography

A Long Life

The rural people of Calabria, in southern Italy, live an unusually long time. The average global lifespan is about seventy-two years, but the residents of this sunny, mountainous peninsula often live into their nineties and beyond — and they suffer less from ailments like dementia and heart disease that typically affect the elderly.

By Raffaele Montepaone
Poetry

The World’s Oldest Person

has died. She attributed her longevity / to divorce and raw eggs, / which she ate daily. / A previous record holder / had no idea why she’d lived so long.

By Elizabeth Onusko