Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died.

So in a very real sense, the drops of water splashed up by waves thundering on the beach before me, and the sand churned up from the beach, are just patterns of the immaterial. Water and sand are real patterns just as the waves are real patterns; but they are patterns of a kind of nothingness.