Issue 533 | The Sun Magazine

May 2020

Readers Write

Weekends

A trip with a stranger, a roadside rescue, a missing husband

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

May 2020

Featuring Medicine Story, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Julia Butterfly Hill, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

Fear Of Rest

In the stillness there are forces and voices and hands and nourishment that arise, that take our breath away, but we can never know this, know this, until we rest.

By Wayne Muller
Quotations

Sunbeams

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end.

Barbara Ward

The Sun Interview

The Four Invasions

Nick Estes On Indigenous Resistance And The Vision Of A Better Future

Indigenous people are protecting the earth’s lungs and liver. Without us, civilization would be even farther down the road to its own destruction.

By Tracy Frisch
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Monotheism At Thirty Thousand Feet

Below me the world turned slowly through the night, unaware of the multilayered geopolitics my coffee-jangled brain was imposing upon it. I could find reasons to forgive Judaism and Islam their present-day sins. Christianity was another matter.

By Andrew Boyd
Fiction

Murder Me Nicely

I’d brought one small bag. A squirrel looked at me and my bag and then ran off, I was sure, to tell the rest of the woodland creatures that a woman had just arrived who had no idea how to pack, let alone survive in the woods: Quick, tell the local serial killer. All that from one squirrel side-eye.

By Lucie Britsch
Fiction

Maryam And Yeshua

Maryam: And then the soldiers — oh, the soldiers. I’d take my time with them. I’d do to them everything they did to you. Maybe I’d leave one or two alive so they could learn how life can be a long nightmare.

Yeshua: I tried to make people see that all we have to do is turn around, leave that whining precious self behind, let it go and see the wholeness of God’s Name, but people want magic and miracles and kings—

By Kate Osterloh
Photography

Unsettled

Almost fifty years ago 170 Romani families settled in the Polygone district of Strasbourg, France. They parked their caravan vehicles and, over time, constructed homes on empty land near an airfield, often using salvaged materials.

By Jeannette Gregori
Poetry

Inheritance

My great-aunt was not the type of lady to smoke / out on the porch. No, she lit up in her living room, and up / and down the stairs, and in her bedroom on hot / Mississippi nights with the windows thrown open.

By Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Poetry

Two Weeks After A Silent Retreat

How quickly I lose my love / of all things. I nearly flick an ant / off the cliff of an armchair.

By Heather Lanier
Poetry

Selected Poems

from “Estelle And Bob” | My father kneels at my mother’s grave / to ask her permission to go on match.com.

By Michael Mark