Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force, an inspiration, and an extraordinary agent of change. I know that many of us were taken by surprise and filled with sadness and even despair at her passing.
Maria Shriver wrote, I depended on her voice, her judgment, and her guidance in the public square. Her death left me feeling down, really down. Who will ever replace her? Who has her character, her fierceness, her ability to work across the aisle? Who will be the beacon of hope that she was?
There is so much sadness and grief in our world! Wildfires burning millions of acres and displacing and harming so many people on the west coast. I read that last week that the air quality in Portland, Oregon was the worst in the world! Covid-19 still rampant. Death, illness, fear, uncertainty. Police brutality and our national reckoning with racial injustice. The country divided. Our democracy seriously threatened. It seems to us like a fight over values and that is deeply disturbing. Values of decency, honesty, integrity, fairness, and equality. It feels to many that the values that our country was founded on are being pushed out. How is this possible? What will become of us? Our planet? Our country?
And then, one of the people who has done the most to uphold those values and transform the way women can move forward to live full, powerful lives passes from this world and leaves a vacant seat on the highest court.
Yesterday I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the New Yorker. She ends it this way:
Preserving the Court’s independence will require courage and conviction of Ginsburgian force. And there are changes, too, that most of us would never want undone. A century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering career as a scholar, advocate, and judge stands as a monument to the power of dissent. “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” (quote from Supreme Court Justice in 1873) It took centuries, and tens of millions of women, to dismantle that nonsense. And no single one of them was more important than Ginsburg, warm-hearted, razor-sharp, and dauntless.
So, right now, as never before, we are called to be dauntless and warm-hearted, even though we are not all lawyers, in positions of power, or as razor-sharp as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After her death. I read and reposted a quote that I found inspiring.
You have been our hero and our North Star. We will not let you down. Rest in peace.
These sentences gave me some reason to get up and keep at it, keep writing post cards to get out the early vote, keep being kind, keep sitting on the meditation cushion and steadying my mind and opening my heart. To keep believing in, imagining, and working for the future of our strong democracy, our beautiful planet, and our vibrant, hopeful children and grandchildren.
Another thing that has helped me in the midst of all this chaos… I have been following what is called a Meditation Practice Intensive with the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community. I meditate with them through Zoom twice a day and attend talks every week. I am also reading Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life that Matters, written in the thirteenth century by Dogen, a Zen priest and founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan. This is the guiding text for this month’s practice. Among other things, Bread Loaf Mountain is a community that is friendly, welcoming, steady, and dedicated to relieving suffering in the world. Listening, reading, and being quiet has helped me take a long view, and to get out of the ruminations of my mind.
And then, there are the grandchildren who live in the present and live in joy. When they were here with us in August, I remember the two oldest kneeling side by side on one of the twin beds in the room where they sleep, glued to the window looking at the full moon rising. Asher said excitedly, “I can’t believe we get to see a yellow moon!”
And then, the evening when Delilah looked out the kitchen window, gasped, and pointed at the flush pink sky. “Look! We have to go outside,” as she grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. “Look at the sunset, Lulu! I am so good at spotting things in Vermont. Better than in Boston….the stars, the moon, the sunset.”
Just before they left, Delilah pressed a stone into my hand. “It is the shape of a heart and it has a heart on it (which it did, in a fossil like form). You can have it.”
I put Delilah’s stone by my bedside alongside two white stones that my brother-in-law, Steve Cadwell picked up somewhere on the beach and saved in a collection. Steve died of brain cancer last year, in August, 2019. Steve’s two stones, and now Delilah’s, remind me of the last words said every evening after the Zen meditation.
Let me respectfully remind you. Life and death are of supreme importance. Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost. Awaken! Take heed! Do not squander your life.
The stones remind me that life is short and we must live it now, fully, awake, doing our best to give it our all in each moment, for the sake of the world, for the sake of others, to create a hopeful future.
May we remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg and may her memory be a blessing, and as I read tonight, a revolution. May we live fiercely and with a warm heart. May we give it our all.
