Kelli Klymenko

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Artist · Photographer · Writer (he/him) — We Have Friends Everywhere ✊🏼
Sedona, Arizona
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦🇺🇸
Substack → wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com
kelliklymenko.com • sedonaincense.com • sedonamagic.printify.me Kelli Klymenko is an artist, storyteller, photographer, teacher, yogi, husband, father, science aficionado and free thinker - experiencing life in one of the most inspiring and pict

uresque places on earth with his fabulous wife and children.

“Remember: grow; learn; conserve; preserve; create; question; educate; change; and free your mind.” – KelliKlymenko.com

The Performance of Peace, while Ukraine is bombed. For three days, Kyiv was relatively quiet.Russia agreed not to strike...
09/09/2026

The Performance of Peace, while Ukraine is bombed.

For three days, Kyiv was relatively quiet.

Russia agreed not to strike the Ukrainian capital while American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled between Moscow and Kyiv. The war itself didn’t stop. Fighting continued elsewhere. But around the Americans, there was a temporary pocket of safety.

Then came the meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Witkoff thanked Putin for suspending strikes on Kyiv so the Americans could travel safely, expressed gratitude over the release of a former U.S. Marine, and even joked about a future in which he, Kushner and Russian officials would someday retire and trade stories about their experiences.

Of Putin, Witkoff said, “yours will be right at the top of it all.”

With Vladimir Putin.

The authoritarian leader whose country invaded Ukraine and is still waging that war. The man wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes connected to the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. More than 18,000 documented Ukrainian children still have not come home.

After more than three hours of talks, there was no announced breakthrough. Russia didn’t abandon its territorial demands. Its military campaign didn’t stop. Witkoff nevertheless said they had made “a lot of progress” and that he was “very encouraged.”

Then the Americans left.

Russia resumed its attacks on Kyiv with ballistic missiles and drones. A school, clinic, dormitory, residential buildings and a television building were damaged. Five people were killed and nearly thirty injured.

Russia started this war. Ukraine didn’t invade Russia and somehow end up in a disagreement over territory. Russia crossed Ukraine’s borders, seized Ukrainian land, kidnapped Ukrainian children and has spent years trying to force Ukrainians to surrender more of their country.

A cordial meeting is not peace. Access to Putin is not progress by itself. And a temporary reprieve for visiting Americans is not peace when Ukrainians remain under attack.

Peace can’t be a performance staged for the people who get to leave. It has to mean something for the people who stay.

Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦

If you value what I’m doing with We Have Friends Everywhere, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.All of my full e...
09/08/2026

If you value what I’m doing with We Have Friends Everywhere, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

All of my full essays remain free to read and share. Paid subscribers receive my Friday Weekly Reflection and access to our community chat as a thank-you, but most importantly, your support helps keep this publication independent and the essays free for everyone.

If paid support isn’t possible, subscribing for free, reading, and sharing the work matters and is appreciated.

We have friends everywhere. ✊🏼

We’ve had some version of this conversation so many times that even the question has become familiar: What happened to o...
09/08/2026

We’ve had some version of this conversation so many times that even the question has become familiar: What happened to our standards?

Donald Trump spent much of the holiday weekend posting on social media.

More than sixty posts appeared Sunday alone, and the posting continued Monday. There were attacks on political opponents. AI-generated images of Trump. Images placing him alongside George Washington. He shared an image ranking himself alone as “The Greatest” president, above Lincoln and Washington. There was imagery of military destruction and an AI image depicting Trump in space as nuclear mushroom clouds rose from Earth. He suggested renaming New Mexico “New America.”

And somehow, this is just another weekend.

Too many people shrug. They scroll. They say, “That’s Trump.”

But “that’s Trump” is not an answer.

Something happens often enough and eventually it stops feeling remarkable, even when the behavior itself hasn’t become any less remarkable.

Familiarity is not the same thing as acceptability. We should know the difference.

Even calling this “trolling” can make extraordinary behavior sound harmless, as though we’re watching someone trying to provoke a reaction online rather than the president publicly circulating fantasies of conquest, destruction and his own glorification.

The presidency isn’t something a person owns. The White House isn’t personal property. The country doesn’t belong to him.

A president temporarily occupies an office that belongs to the American people.

And this is bigger than Donald Trump.

We aren’t only changing our expectations of one man. We’re changing our expectations of leadership.

So maybe this is the question worth carrying into every election from here forward:

Is this what we want public leadership to look like?

We have asked versions of that question before.

At some point, the answer has to matter.

There is something quite spectacular about walking down into the Earth.At Lower Antelope Canyon, you leave the open Ariz...
09/07/2026

There is something quite spectacular about walking down into the Earth.

At Lower Antelope Canyon, you leave the open Arizona sky behind and descend a metal staircase into sandstone shaped across spans of time that are almost impossible to comprehend. For a little while, you’re surrounded by something that existed long before you arrived and will continue changing long after you are gone.

Places like this have a way of rearranging my sense of scale.

Our lives feel enormous while we are living them. Of course they do. This is the only life each of us experiences from the inside. And yet our time here is astonishingly brief.

I find that strangely liberating.

Because if the journey is finite, I can’t understand spending so much of it chasing things that ultimately mean so little. Status. Possessions. Prestige. The need to be important. The endless accumulation of more.

None of those things are inherently wrong. We need money to live. Beautiful objects bring us joy. Accomplishment can be deeply satisfying. But they are terrible measures of whether a life was well lived.

I think much more about what we do while we’re here.

Did I make something? Did I help someone? Did I leave a place better than I found it? Did I love people well? Did I notice where I was while I was here? Was I kind when kindness was mine to give?

Someday, every one of us reaches the end of the journey. The titles disappear. The possessions scatter. Eventually, even our names disappear, worn away by time.

But something of us continues outward. A kindness remembered. Something taught. Something created. A person whose life changed slightly because our paths crossed. An animal whose life was better because someone cared for it. A piece of this Earth protected rather than exploited.

Most of those things will never carry our names. They don’t need to.

We get this extraordinary, bewilderingly brief opportunity to be here.

I couldn’t imagine spending mine trying to look important.

I’d rather know that while I was here, someone was helped, an animal was treated with kindness, something beautiful was created, and I walked as gently on this Earth as I knew how.

Interdependence.We need each other.That sounds like one of the simplest things we know about being human, and yet I wond...
09/06/2026

Interdependence.
We need each other.

That sounds like one of the simplest things we know about being human, and yet I wonder how often we really allow ourselves to understand what it means.

We need people who know us well enough to notice when something is wrong. People who make us laugh, challenge us, sit beside us in silence when there’s nothing useful to say. We need families, friendships, communities, familiar faces—and sometimes people we’ve never met.

A writer whose words reach us at the right moment. A musician who turns feeling into sound and sends it across years or thousands of miles until it reaches us. A stranger who says something kind on a day when kindness mattered more than they could possibly know.

Connection isn’t ornamental to human life.

It’s part of human life.

We are a social species, shaped by roughly 300,000 years of sharing food and knowledge, caring for children, protecting one another, learning from one another and building communities together.

And none of this begins or ends with us.

A bee moves through flowers gathering what it needs, carrying pollen from one bloom to another without understanding the larger system it participates in. Plants capture sunlight. Animals disperse seeds. Fungi and microorganisms return nutrients to the soil.

Nature is relationship.

We aren’t visitors to that system. We’re participants in it.

And we rarely know the full reach of our own connections either.

We may never know how much it matters simply to talk with someone who is struggling. We don’t always know when our presence mattered, when somebody needed to be seen, or when something small changed the course of an otherwise difficult day.

Most of those moments disappear from our view.

But the connection happened.

We need one another. We affect one another. We carry pieces of our encounters forward, sometimes without ever realizing we’re doing it.

We can’t always see what happens afterward.

But that doesn’t mean nothing happened.

We are here together.

We have friends everywhere.

I took this photograph years ago.I remember standing in the darkness here in Sedona, looking toward Bell Rock while the ...
09/05/2026

I took this photograph years ago.

I remember standing in the darkness here in Sedona, looking toward Bell Rock while the Milky Way stretched behind it. I opened the shutter and let my camera do what cameras do: collect light.

I often tell my students that we are all explorers of light. Photography is not just noticing light, but following it and learning what it can reveal.

It is also an exercise in capturing the past. The instant the shutter closes, the moment I photographed has already slipped into it.

Turn a camera toward the night sky and that idea becomes something else entirely.

The light in this photograph didn’t all begin its journey at the same time. Some of those photons traveled for years, centuries, thousands and even millions of years before finally reaching my camera.

We live inside that brilliant cloudy band of light across our sky.

And nothing about it is still.

Earth is spinning beneath our feet. We’re traveling around the Sun at roughly 67,000 miles per hour, while the Sun carries us around the Milky Way at around half a million miles per hour.

One trip around our galaxy takes about 230 million years.

A galactic year.

One galactic year ago, dinosaurs were only just arriving. Two galactic years ago, complex animal life still belonged almost entirely to the sea.

And in its entire 4.6-billion-year existence, the Sun has completed only around twenty trips around the Milky Way.

There’s something wonderfully disorienting about that.

The night sky is an archive. Looking across space means looking backward through time.

For a few moments that night, photons carrying different pieces of the universe’s past arrived together on the sensor inside my camera.

We stand beneath the Milky Way and understand that we’re inside it. We catch ancient light in our eyes and in our cameras, and understand, at least a little, where it came from.

For a few seconds on one dark night in Sedona, I opened the shutter.

And the universe came pouring in.

Unserious People, Serious Power.This has been one hell of a week.After spending day after day researching, writing and t...
09/04/2026

Unserious People, Serious Power.

This has been one hell of a week.

After spending day after day researching, writing and trying to understand what the people with power are actually doing, I realized just how much the anger, frustration and sheer absurdity of it all had been piling up.

It sure can be exhausting.

Because I’m really tired of being governed by children.

Not actual children, obviously. Children generally possess curiosity, an ability to learn and, occasionally, the humility to admit when they don’t know something. I’m talking about grown adults entrusted with extraordinary power who behave like playground bullies who discovered nobody is coming to take away their toys.

We have a former Fox & Friends Weekend host playing GI Joe at the Pentagon while actual people are being killed in an actual war. A Real American Zero.

And this isn’t just about Pete Hegseth’s incompetence or macho posturing. His tenure has included extraordinarily serious questions about military actions and the laws of war. He has spent months selling his male-dominated “warrior ethos” while pushing out women and senior military leaders and fighting with people inside the Pentagon. This week Army Secretary Dan Driscoll walked away after repeated clashes with him.

Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the brain-worm-riddled roadkill enthusiast in charge of American public health, continuing his lifelong crusade to make preventable diseases great again.

I wish that were merely sarcasm.

Yesterday Reuters reported that Kennedy asked the CDC director to remove two Pennsylvania measles-related deaths from the agency’s official tally after disputing whether measles caused them. Pennsylvania has reported 540 measles cases this year.

And then there’s education, where apparently the terrifying danger is children learning too much about American history, race or inequality. “Patriotic education” is now a federal priority while the administration continues its campaign against diversity programs.

Nothing screams confidence in your worldview quite like making sure nobody learns enough to question it.

When One Lever Fails, Pull AnotherThis week, House Republican leadership brought Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs’s consti...
09/03/2026

When One Lever Fails, Pull Another

This week, House Republican leadership brought Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs’s constitutional amendment to the floor. It would have permanently fixed the Supreme Court at nine justices.

It failed.

But look at what they were trying to do.

The Constitution doesn’t require nine Supreme Court justices. Congress has changed the size of the Court repeatedly throughout our history, reaching ten justices in 1863 before settling on nine in 1869. Biggs’s amendment would have taken that authority away from future Congresses and put the number nine into the Constitution.

And Republicans tried to do that while benefiting from the 6–3 conservative majority they helped create through one of the most shameless political reversals of our lifetime.

When Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland in 2016, Election Day was nearly eight months away. Mitch McConnell refused to give him a confirmation vote because voters supposedly deserved a voice in who filled the vacancy.

Four years later, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed eight days before Election Day.

There is no principled way to reconcile those two decisions. Republicans used whichever rule gave them the seat.

And now look at what else is happening. Republicans are pushing the SAVE Act and new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting. The Trump administration is trying to change how mail ballots are handled through the Postal Service and appealing when courts keep stopping it. Trump has repeatedly tried to expand presidential control over elections that the Constitution largely entrusts to the states.

This is why I don’t find individual failures particularly reassuring anymore. Especially when some of these efforts are useful even when they fail. A losing vote can still become an election ad, a fundraising pitch or another manufactured grievance.

The pattern isn’t that Republicans always get what they want. They don’t. The pattern is that when one route closes, they quickly look for another.

The same instinct keeps appearing: find the lever that works.

Biggs’s amendment was another lever. This one didn’t work.

The question is what they pull next.

Desperate People Do Desperate ThingsI have distrusted Republican politics for most of my life.I was a teenager during Ro...
09/02/2026

Desperate People Do Desperate Things

I have distrusted Republican politics for most of my life.

I was a teenager during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. I watched trickle-down economics sold as prosperity while deficits exploded. I watched Republican administrations sell tax cuts and fiscal responsibility while adding enormously to the debt, followed again and again by Democrats inheriting the consequences and trying to repair them.

But I never thought I would watch one of America’s two major political parties become willing to sacrifice democracy itself rather than risk losing power.

Maybe I was naive.

Or maybe I knew it was possible, but knowing something is possible is different from watching it happen.

Look at the behavior now: the SAVE Act. Attacks on voting and elections. Attacks on the press. Efforts to expand presidential power and weaken the institutions capable of restraining it. And now a Republican proposal to amend the Constitution to permanently fix the Supreme Court at nine justices while Republicans hold a 6–3 conservative majority.

The pattern is simple: keeping the power.

If persuasion isn’t enough, change the rules. If the rules aren’t enough, change who can vote. If an institution might someday be changed by someone else, lock it down while you control it.

On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump told Christian voters, “Get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore.” He told them they would have it “fixed” so they wouldn’t have to vote again.

Democracy is not something you “fix” so people no longer need to vote.

Sometimes you lose.

You lose an election. You lose a majority. You lose a court case. You lose an argument. Then you make a better argument. You persuade more people. You organize. You run again.

Political power in a democracy is supposed to be temporary because ultimately it doesn’t belong to the people holding office.

It belongs to us.

Desperate people do desperate things.

And desperate people with the power of the United States government at their disposal can do enormously dangerous things.

We should be paying very close attention to what they’re trying to lock into place while they still can.

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