Medicare
I finished signing up for Medicare yesterday. I am fortunate to have a friend, a insurance professional who is competent to coach me through the process. Insurance coverage for health care is a reminder of our mortality, that mind does not overrule matter. Despite the fantasies of youth this body which I inhabit is not the exception to that of others or for that matter to the rest of material substance. I greatly enjoy travel to a forest, the sea shore, or to the mountains. Those expressions of Nature seem eternal, enduring, appearing to go on impassively, forever. By comparison to the span of my life, there is some truth to that appearance. Yet my better judgement knows that there is no respite from time, from change, from the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Nature too dies, to be reborn.
At least I can afford Medicare with supplemental coverage. The insurance will make the coming years less pain ridden, more free. But in the end the result will be to follow the path that all of Nature follows.
To be alive, to enjoy awareness of beauty, of meaning, of earth and sky, and of others entails payment, an exchange. As with the burning of an incense stick, the fire (passion) that produces the aroma, consumes the stick.
And the huge heavenly cow, a mother whose blood is always being shed, demands that man, too, be sacrificed: the myth of exchange.
There is no doubt that Blue Cross Blue Shield will expect my premium check to be dispatched on time. That too is a sacrifice, a matter of exchange.