Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.
THE GREAT UNRAVELING
A meditation on sea stars, memory, and impermanence
I began by scanning the news—casually, even cynically—expecting to find nothing of consequence. Most stories these days fall like dust: dull, forgettable, detached from the pulse of my own life. But then, buried beneath headlines of conflict and politics, a quiet sorrow surfaced:
Scientists have discovered the cause of a sea star plague that has, since 2013, wiped out more than five billion sea stars across the Pacific coast, from Mexico to Alaska.
At first glance, it felt unrelated—a distant ecological tragedy. But as I read on, something stirred.
A memory.
A flicker of childhood wonder.
I remembered when coral reefs bloomed beneath the ocean’s skin—vibrant ecosystems untouched by human interference. Fish of every color danced through the underwater cathedrals, colonies thriving in ancient harmony. Back then, the sea was a mystery and a miracle. It felt eternal.
Now, such coral is rare. What remains is fragile, quarantined from human touch and trespass. We are told not to interfere, not to breathe upon it the breath of our destruction—our oils, our plastics, our bacteria.
And yet, we always do.
Not with malice, perhaps, but with the tragic momentum of our presence. The sea stars vanish. The reefs dissolve. The ocean, once imagined infinite, shows its seams.
But this, too, is part of a deeper design.
Everything breaks down—creatures, systems, beauty itself—only to reconfigure elsewhere, into something new, something unseen. We live inside a fractal of existence, where nothing truly ends and nothing wholly begins. The universe is a quiet engine of becoming: building, dissolving, rebuilding.
Even the smallest life—the sea star—becomes a glyph in this cosmic language. And we, too, are written in.
It reminds me: the beginning is beyond imagination.
The end is beyond dreaming.
And still, between them, there is memory.
Aug. 4, 2025, 6:23 PM CDT / Source: The Associated Press
By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON
There is my art.
There is my near-death experience.
There is this moment—
always unraveling,
always becoming.
My Near Death Experience Arts and Thoughts 