I slept soundly enough last night.  The news late Friday was of the passing of Supreme Court Judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Justice Ginsburg’s death is a momentous event, a breaking away of the keystone if you will, of a liberal (humane) democratic society as we have known it, as imperfect as it has been.  Given a majority “conservative” (crypto-fascist) Supreme Court, little imagination is required to conceive the future of the nation.

What is to be done?  It is unclear if anything is to be done.  Events have a momentum of their own, a throw-weight, a current and one can do little other than exert a little influence, one way or another.

I read a short story by Merry Speece entitled, Fire Sermon.  The story begins with an account of a barn burning.  It is a candidly Buddhist contemplation of the experience and consequence of desire.  Desire is arguably the driving force of life, the life force if you will.  Desire, mutual desire between male and female is the biological cause of birth.  A infant has it’s own quotient of desire, a flame of life apparent with the first breath, and cry into the external world.  The flame will grow as the child matures and is educated to become an adult.

So what might be done, given the anticipated balloting day on November 3rd, the possibility, for any number of causes, the outcome will be thrown into the lap of the Supreme Court?

Consider the purchase of a weapon and ammo?

That would only accelerate the fire, like grabbing a can of kerosene and……

What does one do when everything is on fire?

These words from Speece’s short story:

The flames of grassfire come in a wave across the field.  The only way to stop it is to cut the earth, but we keep watching the wave of fire coming toward the outbuildings and think someone else will get the plow.

And just as I raised my hand with juvenile excitement to say that “love” is the answer to the craving that burns all around us…  We simply must love more…  Speece writes:

I thought that a man, that love, that passion between two human beings could keep me from disease and death.  It is not true.  Not first love, not new love, even as strong as they are.  Love is kerosene thrown and flesh a chunk of fuel that will hold fire for a long time.

Oh we are the children that cry to touch the fire, to set something on fire and to try to put it out with such a little breath.

The short story ends with these words:

And our earth inside itself burns…  Our whole earth can burn in minutes, each of us with our fingers pausing in an act of undressing on a button that detonates a firestorm out of our own blackened hearts.  And how do you stop the earth from burning?  There is not water enough …

And what did they — you — do at the barn burning? I asked. 

Everybody just stood around and watched, he said, because nothing else could be done.

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Merry Speece’s story and others can be found in Nixon Under the Bodi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction edited by Kate Wheeler, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2004