This magazine is like an iceberg; most of it is submerged, and tells a story at least as interesting as the pages you hold in your hand.

From idea to printed page, there’s more perspiration than inspiration: editing, typesetting, proofreading, layout, paste-up. Then there’s the printing process itself: the pasted-up page is photographed and that image is, in turn, photographically imposed on a metal plate. The plate goes on the press, where it transfers the image to a rubber-covered metal roller which then transfers it to the paper.

Offset printing is relatively easy to explain, but there are mysteries everywhere. Surfaces deceive; the familiarity of things disappears when we realize how little we know. I don’t know how this sentence will end, or how I form the words, or how you manipulate these symbols into something that makes sense. The awesomely sophisticated phototypesetter that turns these words into lines of justified type is, despite its computerized innards, far less complex than a poem or a love affair — that is to say, the mind.

Yet, for all our ignorance, we paradoxically know far more than we acknowledge. We create our reality, not just symbolically, and not just with our hands, but literally, by translating thoughts and feelings into physical objects. This happens on a level deeper than ordinary waking awareness; it happens in the submerged seven-eighths of consciousness. The astounding notion that our entire physical environment comes as naturally from our inner minds as words come from our mouths, that you form objects — the room you’re in, the chair you’re in, the hands holding this page — as unself-consciously as you breathe, may seem ludicrous, or blasphemous, but it’s neither. (The Seth books, by Jane Roberts, explain this better than anything I’ve read. Don’t be put off by Seth’s non-physical reality; he’s far more down to earth than Ronald Reagan).

For me, THE SUN is a lesson in creation, on many levels. The more intimately I understand it — its hidden and revealed dimensions, the ocean of mind that buoys it — the more I understand about the rest of the world. The information it conveys is invisible — as an object, it’s only paper and ink. But as an object, you’re only flesh and bones. Yet you give these words meaning, create them in the most literal sense. This shared act — our minds joining here, now — is as close to love as I come.

— Sy