Cleaning and still more time on the income tax

I actually like cleaning; it is sort of refreshing to just work away at manual tasks like that. You have immediate results and it gratifies the spirit perhaps. 

Thinking about Ukraine and their suffering. It is a dreadful unbelievable war happening after so many years of peace. One wonders why the peace has to be broken now. What does Russia gain out of all of this? I can not see it other than a complete shift in the way that they are going to move forward in time if they ever do. Authoritarianism has not worked in the world; there is always that free spirit of homo sapiens wanting to have a say in how their world goes. Democracy lets that free spirit rise to its greatest heights but authoritarianism only permits the very few to have a free spirit. Free spirit will always find a way to exist sort of like human life itself. I think the free spirit is humanness. 

Watching women about to give birth in a bombed hospital. They looked exhausted but yet they knew their task ahead was to give birth and they were ready for that. Women giving birth can be quite fearless having experienced that feeling twice in my life. You are looking for those living signs in your infant and your own state is of no interest to you in that moment of time. Gradually as you recover your thoughts are still attached to that small being that you brought into the world and it never really leaves you. The women of Ukraine may not be staying as they are heading off with their children but if they found a safe spot for those children (and they will; as many as want to come to Canada can come as our Prime Minister said) they would be back to fight alongside their husbands to free their land.  DNA does tell the story of our past and these peoples of Ukraine stretch back for thousands and thousands of years (they were after all one of the three Ice Refuges 15,000 years ago where homo sapiens retreated to to save themselves from the Ice Age that came at that time). They have seen it all. 

Russia should appreciate the Ukrainians as they helped to delay the Nazis during World War II and fought them just as they are fighting Russia now to get them off their land. Instead Russia wants to be a colonial empire. They should look to Africa and see what happened in the 1950s to the old colonial empires there. They rose up the Africans and threw out the colonials (remember Angola). Colonial is archaic. Be friends with the people around you and perhaps they will want to be part of a trading group instead of making them fear you and wanting to be part of an organization that could help to protect them. Ukrainians must be tired of fighting and yet they fight on; it is their free spirit; their human desire to be free.