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The Loneliest Monk Listens

The first step is to imagine. / No, before that: breathe. Breathe, and know / breath. That’s where it begins.

Keening for the Cailleach

The best nights are when moonlight comes through the trees, casting indigo shadows across the ice. My partner swoops around, his arms swinging in front of his crouched body. “It’s the closest we get to flying,” he said once as he sailed past me. Another time: “Maybe this is how a dolphin feels carving through the water.” He loves the tension of the blade slicing across the surface, the whoosh of his skates drawing elaborate patterns on the ice, the crunch of a hockey stop. I listen for the occasional owl.

Sunbeams

The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.

Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006

From Somebody To Nobody To . . .

An Interview With Ram Dass

I think that any kind of myth you have about what you think is happening is too small and heady for what really is. What really is, is that this is the manifestation of God. And it’s all just fine. It’s horrible but fine. I mean fine with all of its horror.

Losing Our Religion

Molly Worthen On The Modern Search For Meaning

It seems every year a new survey comes out in which the category of “no religious affiliation” grows larger and larger. A small portion of those people embrace the label atheist or agnostic, but the vast majority don’t, and some would say the phrase “spiritual but not religious” applies to them.

Sunbeams

Not everybody feels religion in the same way. Some it’s in their mouth, but some it’s like a hope in their blood, their bones.

Tillie Olsen, “O Yes”

This Month In Sun History

Our 50^th Year Of Publication

Sitting with his first wife, Judy, and a friend on a sunny beach in Algeciras, Spain, Sy Safransky embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately led him to create the magazine you now hold in your hand. In March 1970, for the first time, he placed a tab of LSD on his tongue. He was twenty-five years old.

Messages

In the months following Mom’s death in February 2021, I tried to get her to say something to me, to speak to me. If anyone could communicate from beyond, I thought, it was her.

Sunbeams

Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.

J. Krishnamurti