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Friend Of The Sun

$56,072,139.17

Fifty-six million tusheronies burning a hole in my pocket. “What am I going to do with it all?” I ask myself. “If it’s for real,” I say to myself. “They wouldn’t make a mistake of that dimension,” I tell myself.

Songs Of Dawn

On Our Fifteenth Anniversary

Someone asked me recently how I raised the money — or, as he put it, the venture capital — to start The Sun. I told him it was easy: I borrowed fifty dollars from a friend.

Salvaging The Future

Michael Helm On The Virtues Of Junk

Practically, managing a salvage yard is a great way to make a living because there is so much waste in this culture. Fifteen years ago, I dropped out of corporate life and got into salvage — actually, it was called junk back then.

Friend Of The Sun

Money Versus People

The power that transforms our lives into money is lethal. The whales and redwoods, for example, were gone before the harpoon struck or the ax fell, from the moment they became money. . . . The same with ideas, memories, history, child care, healing, silence, and peace of mind. Capital looked their way; they became dollars and cents.

Questions Of Lifestyle

Voluntary simplicity has gained popularity since the late Sixties. Of course the idea is at least as old as the first religions, but nowadays voluntary simplicity is not practiced for overtly religious reasons. A cynic might say that a sense of reparation for damages done is driving some to practice a new spirit of self-denial. It touches most strongly, after all, the descendants of the adventurous, progressive pioneers from Western Europe who invaded this country a few centuries ago. In any case, exploitation is a touchstone by which many of us gauge our use of toilet paper, gasoline, rubber, washing machines, nylon, coffee, newspaper and on and on.

A Letter To Our Readers

A Letter To Our Readers