Just before I started writing this, I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter: a funny, old Korean tale about how the sea became salty.
It went something like this: a thief stole the king's magical millstone and after a successful getaway by boat, he felt peckish. His bread was, however, a tad too sweet, so he tapped the millstone and wished for some salt.
Unfortunately he had no clue how to stop it, so it kept on churning salt, until the boat sank, and the millstone with it, to the bottom of the sea, where it still lies to this day, pouring out salt.
I was mimicking the voice of the panicked thief who saw all his dreams of wealth and richness fade away under the mountain of salt. Suddenly: déjà vu. To my ears, this sounded just like the real story happening right now beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Courtesy of the guys at British Petroleum (BP) we now have a hole from hell, churning out millions of gallons of viscous poisonous oil - and, like the millstone's fare, there is no end in sight. The only difference is that this is no fairytale.
To be honest, I had been, for days, trying to push the BP oil spill from my mind. I think day-to-day life is quite a toil in itself, so I often refuse to allow space in my head for large-scale tragedies. I am one of those who mostly follow 'silly news'. I know. I'm like a horse with blinders.
It's very easy to live in a bubble on this island of ours. That's not to say we're cut off or in a vacuum - we all have a vague idea of what's happening on lands far away - but we look at things through thick binoculars from the security of our shores - safe in the (false) knowledge that all that hullabaloo won't ever affect us.
Certainly, not grieving over one of the most devastating environmental disasters humans have ever induced in history, makes for better sleeping at night.
Stark reality is scary. Here we are, living in the most powerful, most technological and most advanced era the world has ever lived in; and yet, we can do nothing about this manmade catastrophic oil spill.
Yes, US President Barack Obama is very cross and is keen to figure out whose bottom needs kicking. And yes, BP will be paying massive penalties. Meanwhile, though, our planet's eco-system is getting a bashing.
I cannot bear to look at one more picture of helpless birds drowning in the black stuff; of pelicans glutted with viscous oil, without feeling sheer remorse, guilt, almost. These heartbreaking photos are but a mere admonition of the irreparable cost to the worldwide community.
We can point our fingers at the carelessness of multinational oil corporations but the truth is that each one of us is responsible for this tragedy. It's our dependence on oil.
And we all have a little of that bloody oil on our hands: we all drive, fly, use appliances, switch on lights, air-conditioners and, well, everything. Most of the things we do can be traced back to oil procurement.
And thanks to that, our greed for oil, and our global reluctance to change to alternative energies, we are killing our planet.
Just think about it: homosapiens have been around for about 200,000 years; it was only 10,000 years ago that we stopped being hunter-gatherers; and only in the last 300 years that we ditched nature in favour of the 'myth of progress'. Our recent economic and ecological woes are a clear testament that the world cannot take much more of this abusive 'progress' of ours.
It's time to go back to the land. By that I don't mean let's go back to horse-drawn carriages and candlesticks. But perhaps we really need to step back and ensure that our modern technology and manufactured world chimes with our ancient, more natural day-to-day existence.
In the meantime, one family, lifelong residents on Grand Isle, Louisiana, off the Gulf of Mexico, erected a simple little cemetery of one hundred and one small crosses, lining their front yard for all those passing by to see, each one commemorating something they love, like 'brown pelicans', 'beach sunsets' and 'sand between the toes'. The sign next to this cemetery of dreams reads, 'In memory of all that is lost'.
As I took my first summer dip in the sea last Monday, I painfully wondered how many more years we have of enjoying the salty clean sea. I have a nagging suspicion my daughter will be reading to her children a globalised-world folktale about how the sea became a dump.