Light over Dark

I’ve been holding onto an unusually intense dream that’s appropriate for today.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, was leading a very small tactical team including me on a covert mission deep within the Kremlin. We all were incredibly silent and the living quarters were eerily vacant as we breached them, so I figured there had to be help from the inside — which just got me even more worried that our mission was to, you know, take a certain someone out, quite possibly for the greater good of humanity but perhaps at a cost to my own since I was new to this stuff.

Once we arrived in a long, ostentatious dining room, a signal was given and a bunch
of children filed in. Then a film projector started up and unspooled Star Wars on an expanse of blank wall space to the kids’ delight. I can’t say if it was meant to be humanitarian relief for a group of hostages, soft propaganda to win over sheltered, indoctrinated young minds, or what, but it was apparently successful as the scene jumped to a few of us sitting in a dimly lit parlor with a woman who might have been the late Madeleine Albright offering congratulations on a job well done.

Let It Grow

I was digging into my copy of Comics for Ukraine — and so already keenly aware
of the compartmentalization we practice daily to appreciate art in the midst of tragedy or, more generally, simply live our lives even as they or the lives of others are under imminent threat — when reports came in from Israel of the horrifying assaults there
on Saturday.



The book, just recently arrived, was crowdfunded in June of last year through Zoop
to benefit the work done by Operation USA. Its subtitle is Sunflower Seeds after the curse directed at Russian soldiers by a bold Ukranian woman who told them to put seeds in their pockets so that when they die sunflowers will grow in their place on the land they attempted to occupy.