The Sun

I've been reading The Sun, October, 2009. I love The Sun. I first received it as a gift subscription and have maintained it ever since, except for maybe a 6-month period when life was disrupted.... I like pretty much everything about it, down to the letters to the editor, which have the same excruciating honesty as the Readers Write section. I love the poems, I love the stories, I love the essays, and I love the general outlook--which contains generosity, liberalism, optimism, and realism in just the right mix.

I have based poem assignments for my little class on poems found in the pages of the The Sun! I have found and contacted some of its writers by email, to thank them for their work, and I have shared particular pieces with my mom, my son, my daughter, and a friend recently. Stuff in The Sun makes us think of our individual relationships, and our own lives, and do particular things about them.

My friend who gave me the original subscription just borrowed the August issue, which has an article/interview on deep breathing exercises that can do the same thing LSD can do to the brain, but safely. She had misplaced or loaned out her copy, and needed to share the article with a friend; likewise, I want to share the article with my sister, an expert on deep breathing, yoga, theatre, body/mind. I had already discussed this particular article with my daughter, recently a Beatles fan, and alerted to altered states, thanks to the film Across the Universe with all those great Beatles covers. Same friend also loaned me all those issues from the subscription lapse, but she wants them back!

So The Sun inspires a lot of sharing, but also some "keeping," some treasuring.

I recommend reading it, then subscribing. One thing I love about it is that it has no ads. We subscribers keep it alive. That, too, is a direct relationship, and a kind of deep sharing.

And it keeps the editor, Sy Safransky, free. Independent and free.