Impermanence

Margie and I were talking about our fear for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been recently treated for cancer. To our amazement, the world’s amazement and gratitude, Ginsburg continues to thrive and to work full-time as a Supreme Court judge at eighty-six, and everyone in the USA who is not a Trump supporter hopes Ginsburg will live forever. “I don’t know why some people have a tendency to infantilize old people,” Margie said as we sipped our coffee. “It makes me furious. But you can’t even imagine anyone doing that to her.”

There aren’t many models of old women having the wisdom to set boundaries, to steer their own course. I thought of Wendy Hiller’s portrayal of “Lady Slane” in the film adaptation of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. Hiller was seventy-seven when she took the role of a widow who refuses to be managed by her children when her husband dies. It’s a brilliant performance, now available on Youtube.

Later in the day a terrifying grass fire swept through NE Portland and came within a few feet of Dharma Rain Zen Center, lovingly hand-built and fashioned by its small but devoted community of Buddhists who raised funds and labored continually to create their center over the past seven years. It would have been a great loss to the Buddhist community of Portland if the center had burned down. When the fire was only a few feet from their outbuildings, the wind shifted and the fire devoured instead a gym, a skate park, and someone’s home. It was a terrible day for some people, but fire fighters skillfully averted what could have been much greater disaster, as many homes lay in the path of the fire. It is a frightening reminder of the impermanence of all things and the horror of the climate emergency.