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Sunbeams

War: A Sunbeams Supplement

The Dancing Master Of Kung Fu

Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time.

My Earth Day

We were all terribly sorry we’d made the earth pay for our pleasure these last 200 years. We had a fear-taste in our mouths. Maybe the earth is preparing revenge. In comic books, an exposure to toxicity creates superpowered heroes, but in this world we are not so lucky.

The Legacy Of The Wild

An Interview With Gary Snyder

Another way of seeing the world would be to say our monuments would be our wild areas. Leaving behind wilderness for the future would be the monument of our civilization.

Obstacles To Peace

An ex-spiritual-pest-control adherent; Portland, Oregon residents during the Chernobyl disaster; an expletive spewing six-year-old

A Kind Word Turneth Away Wrath

Aikido And The New Warrior

I was overjoyed. “My prayers have been answered,” I thought to myself as I got to my feet. “This . . . this . . . slob is drunk and mean and violent. He’s a threat to the public order, and he’ll hurt somebody if I don’t take him out. The need is real. My ethical light is green.”

Making War Obsolete

An Interview With Gene Sharp

Our aim is to blow the top off nonviolent struggle and show people that it’s much more powerful than they believe.

Enemies

Further Ruminations On The Great Peace March

Toward the end of the Great Peace March For Global Nuclear Disarmament, we all anticipated that we would finally be getting plenty of national media attention. It was what most of us wanted all along, but in fact there is something surreal about being a media item. No matter how sympathetic or even accurate the stories about us were, I always felt, “That’s not us.”

The Price Of Peace

What I would like to share with you is something very simple but also very difficult: simple things often are. It is an invitation to pay the price for peace. We all know that peace is an exceedingly high good. But for an exceedingly high good we should expect to have to pay an exceedingly high price.

The Warrior And The Militarist

A Discussion

To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything. — Gary Snyder