by admin | Oct 8, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
I have been thinking seriously for some time about being an Earthling. Laurel and Edwin have encouraged me to write about it. I was also encouraged along the way by none other than Germaine Greer. During her appearance on Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, she rejected being labelled with any specific national home, declaring instead, “I am an Earthling.” ‘Yes’, I thought, ‘that’s what I am’. I wonder if my reasons for thinking about myself this way are the same as hers.
It is not that I want to depreciate or deprecate in any way that I live in Australia, that I am an Australian. On the contrary. It is a wonderful country; I am very pleased to live here. That’s it really; I live here. It is not who I am in an ultimately defining sense. My sense of identity is searching for something deeper, bigger. I did play for a while with thinking of myself as an Anglo-Celt, that this was my ‘indigenaity’. My grandfather came out from Scotland in the 1880’s. It is true that I have appreciated getting more in touch with my racial roots in my old age. In 2015 my family attended a Gathering of the Clans in Scotland, followed by a conference of the Oliphant Clan at which I met Oliphant’s from around the world, especially North America. But the deal was clinched when I learnt that two of my daughters have the ‘Celtic curse’, Hemochromatosis. It is primarily caused by a mutation in the HFE gene, which disrupts the body’s ability to regulate iron absorption from food. It is exceptionally common in people of Celtic, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern European descent.
Strangely enough, emotionally connecting with my Celtic roots opened my heart to how important ‘being aboriginal’ is to First Nation people in Australia. I began to not just acknowledge this with my ‘head’, I felt it. Landscape or Country does identify us somehow. Something moves me in the landscape of northern Scotland, and Britain generally, in a way that is a bit different to the ways the landscape moves me in Australia. Both are fundamentally important, but the first time I drove through the British countryside I ‘teared up’ with the thought I had ‘come home’.
Something runs deep here, but nonetheless my search for a sense of identity was still somehow not yet quite satisfied. ‘The issue’ a friend said to me ‘is what it really means to be a human being’. A human being! Of course, we are all ‘human beings’. This is true, but why doesn’t it help all that much I wondered. I am a human being! It is not so much a sense of personal identity as a description of who I am that separates me from other creatures. Given that there was a time when we were not on this little planet, before homo sapiens had evolved, being a ‘human being’ does differentiate me in terms of ‘time’, while also connecting me with all other creatures who are ‘human beings’; but not strongly perhaps and not for long. We quickly revert to being ‘male’, or ‘female’, or ‘transgender’, to being an American, or Russian or Australian, or a Canberran or a Londoner or a New Yorker, or a Carlton supporter or a South Sydney fan or whatever. The problem with ‘human being’ is it is indeterminate with regard to ‘place’. I think that’s it. I think a sense of place makes all the difference for a sense of personal identity.
I somehow knew this before I knew I knew it. I have told the story before of picking up my youngest daughter, who is now a middle-aged woman, from primary school when she was less than ten. Her class had watched a video of Planet Earth taken from space. As she watched, the thought had come to her that she was down there somewhere, running around. I was amazed. She was standing outside the place that gave her her existence, her being, her ‘home’, and seeing it over and against her in genuine photographic images which no doubt she was also internalising. At the same time she was also imagining herself in her ‘mind’s eye’ as ‘down there’ somewhere. This surely was a very significant shift of consciousness. It was as if her imagination could take the photographs and use them to project herself in her ‘mind’s eye’ into space and there to ‘see’ or ‘look at’ the planet, and herself, from space.
I remembered the time when I first read that the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, as early as 1948, had famously written: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available… a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose”. In his 1950 book The Nature of the Universe, Hoyle argued that seeing our world in its sheer cosmic isolation would fundamentally shift human consciousness. I had been very taken with this. This had happened to my daughter, it would seem, to some degree, spontaneously. Could this happen to me, intentionally?
Such photographs came to pass when the iconic Earthrise image captured by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968, followed by the 1972 Apollo 17 Blue Marble photo, were published. Many other photos have followed. However, it was not only the actual photographs that caught my attention; it was also the experiences of the astronauts themselves at the time. One aspect of those experiences has been called the ‘overview effect’.
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterised the effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative. Immersive virtual reality simulations have been designed to try to induce the overview effect in earthbound participants. (Wikipedia)
Earthrise
The Blue Marble
I could relate to this ‘overview effect’, to some degree, or so I thought, from my own experiences. I wondered if it was like ‘seeing’ something for the first time that had been looked at many times before, but never really seen. In the moment I actually ‘see’ that something it is a particular and not just an example of something general. I don’t dismiss it in its generality as I so often do, I stop and am taken by its particularity. I sense its presence. I enjoy to do that regularly with what I can see from my window or when I am walking in nature. The secret is not to analyse it in any way, or even to name it, but to just take it in and let it ‘speak’, let it reveal itself. This is in fact the basis of the science advocated by the great German thinker and playwright Goethe.
It is a science based on relationship rather than objectivity. When we give anything or anyone its ‘being’, its presence, an idea can be awoken within us that we can ‘feed’ on and respond to in our imagination. It is an affirmation of spirit rather than its negation. It is a sense of participation in the world around us. The breeze in the trees becomes life and spirit within me. Both my thoughts and my feelings are engaged. I experience this directly. Rightly or wrongly I take it that this is an experience similar to the First Nations’ experience of country and dadirri. It is about felt relationship and what converses between us. I am investing something personal and relational in my own planet, much as the ancients invested something personal and relational in the Sun and the stars. It was just such a sense of relationship with the Sun that led Copernicus, and also Kepler, to devoutly think about the Earth and the solar system from the point of view of the Sun, as if they were standing on it; and they went from such personal imagination of wonder to mathematical science from this new perspective. A great shift of consciousness heralded the modern world and changed us all.
But now in our time a further shift has occurred, and we need to catch up with it. Now human beings can not only just imagine being in space as Copernicus and Kepler did, we have actually been in space, and have photos to prove it. This very year we have even seen the far side of the moon, something never seen by a human being before, and we have all been invited to directly share in this experience, if we can let ourselves be so represented. When the crew of Artemis II first spoke to the gathered crowd after their splash-down, having just seen what no human being had ever seen before, the other side of the Moon, the Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hanson, in finishing his words, said: “I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you”.
‘This is you’. The overview effect was still strongly at work within him, I would suggest, and he was clearly experiencing a sense of representing us in what he had experienced. It was our experience as much as his, if we can believe that? I can. I want to. That planet, ‘down there’ is where I am running around and it is my home. I am an Earthling. I can stand outside myself and the place where I come from, and imagine the whole human story before me on that little planet to which I belong. I can in my own faltering way grasp the ‘Whole’, in both time and space, however the details might be progressively filled in.
Google AI tells me that the word ‘Earthling’ was first recorded in 1593 by the English writer Thomas Nashe in his pamphlet Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. In the 1590s, the word was a religious and philosophical term used to describe mortal, physical humans tied to the dirt, contrasting them with God and angels in heaven. An older related Old English word, yrþling or eorþling, meant a “plowman” or farmer, but the modern re-formation meaning an inhabitant of Earth appeared in the late 16th century. The modern planetary meaning, contrasting humans with space aliens, was popularised later in science fiction.
In other words in being an Earthling I can imagine myself to be an alien to myself and think and imagine the whole human Story, from the Big Bang to wherever and whenever we may be heading, a Story that I am both outside and viewing in my imagination, and yet at the same time part of, along with every one else. I am held by the ‘Whole’. We all are, but most of us don’t realise it. Saying I am an Earthling for me is not being ‘cute’. It is asserting a sense of identity that includes both a sense of place and a sense of time, and is entirely inclusive. And it is a Big Story. It is a shift of consciousness. It is a Becoming. It is a commitment. I will be working at it for the rest of my life.
I remember once sometime ago fantasising that it would be a good thing if all our world leaders were bundled into a spacecraft and taken into space to witness Blue Marble and Earthrise for themselves, to really ‘see’ our planet in its ‘cosmic isolation’ and experience the ‘overview effect’ for themselves, to understand the fundamental importance of wanting to be Earthlings for the sake of our planetary Home. The time has surely come that this sense of identity needs to touch us all if we are going to “beat ‘our’ swords into plowshares, and ‘our’ spears into pruning hooks; and nation not lift up sword against nation, and neither learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3). We are all Earthlings; we just have to know it and live it.
David Oliphant
October 2026
by admin | May 12, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
After just a few months here and a lot of hard work, self-doubt and feeling overwhelmed, God came through with a strong response this weekend. Remembering Sister Laurel’s message, ‘Elm Grove will not fail’, we got to experience a taste of this. We had the blessing of my “Men Alive” friends come to do a full-on working bee over the Anzac Day long weekend.
They achieved what would have taken me at least a month to achieve with fellowship, prayer and great food and drink. One guy who left on Sunday morning felt the need to come back because he ‘was just sad leaving’, so he brought his wife and her friends back to join us that evening.
Fr Dave from the Missionaries of God’s Love (MGL) celebrated mass in St Clare’s chapel (our first mass) and Sar and I couldn’t stop the tears. A chapel with 26 people, feeling the Spirit moving, and us knowing very deeply that this is exactly where we are supposed to be and what this is all about.
This is just the beginning. Imagine hundreds coming to connect with what is most important – our true selves – and of letting the shadows go! Sar and I have no idea on the ‘How’. But God is showing us glimpses of what might just be possible for Elm Grove into the future. We will do our best to say Yes.
Please pray for us. An awesome weekend, thank you God!
(MGL is a Roman Catholic religious contemplative community of priests, brothers, and sisters that came into being in Canberra, Australia in 1986, founded by Fr Ken Baker who was inspired by St Francis of Assisi during a visit to Umbria, Italy in 2000. He founded the Young Men of God Movement to reach out and empower young men with the love of God and to encourage them to become leaders within their own communities; maximise the talents God has given them; and realise their full potential.)
by admin | May 12, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
“Come, Come, Whoever you are Ours is not a caravan of despair Come, Come, Whoever you are This caravan has no despair. Even though you have broken your vow perhaps ten thousand times Yet come again, come again, whoever you are whoever you are, come Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, come Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving”
These words by the 13th century poet Jalaluddin Rumi formed the opening to an event at Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney under the banner of ‘In the Service of Peace’. The event was an interfaith gathering in response to events being witnessed in the middle east and elsewhere and was hosted by Dr Stephanie Dowrick who is well known as an author, publisher and psychotherapist and who is also an interfaith minister.
Addressing those gathered in the church, Stephanie Dowrick spoke of the challenges facing humanity at this point in time. The response to these challenges requires courage and the support of community, and what can enable these qualities to thrive is joy. So, the event was a celebration of the joy to be found in poetry and music.
Poetry included the reciting of works by Sufi poets such as Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic whose words resonate with timeless authenticity. Music formed a backdrop but also came to the fore with a performance of a guitar piece from 9th century Moorish Spain. A pair of soprano voices rang through the church and came together to bring the event towards a close performing the Flower Duet from Lakme by Delibes.
It was an altogether uplifting event and a source of joy and inspiration. Stepping out onto the noise and busy-ness of Pitt Street I somehow felt a little lighter, and my step was imbued with a sense of hope.
People for Peace
A week later I attended another event at Pitt St Uniting Church. This time the event was hosted by Standing Together Sydney and brought together speakers, musicians and community members to promote peace in a region that is currently riven by violence.
The ‘Standing Together’ movement is a grassroots movement based in Israel that seeks to bring about peace, equality, social and climate justice for Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Arabs.
Speakers came from different backgrounds and faiths including Israel, Lebanon, Hindu and Moslem. Once again, music played an important part of the event. In the midst of conflict, music is seen as a way of bringing people together and the performances were beautiful and exceptionally moving. From an Arab lullaby to songs written and performed in response to genocide and war they both soothed and inspired a sense of deep respect for those facing the horrors of war.
A young Israeli man spoke of hope, but not just hope…hope that is accompanied by courage and the resolve to bring about lasting peace. And peace is not just the absence of war but the flourishing of culture and joy.
And once again, after being inspired by the stories shared and experiencing the joy of music, as I stepped out of the church, I too was able to feel a sense of hope.
by admin | May 12, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
Christina Koch of the NASA Artemis crew spoke recently about participating in the longest voyage ever made by human beings. She said it truly taught her the meaning of what it is to be part of a crew, “A crew is a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable.”
These words are something we can all relate to as the crew of a rescue unit whose united purpose is #SavingLivesOnTheWater
One of the great things about volunteering with Marine Rescue NSW is the powerful and precious feeling of working together as part of a well-trained and focused team.
Koch added that one of her strongest revelations came while observing Earth appear tiny through the window of Orion, and all of the blackness around it. “There’s one new thing I know, and that is, planet Earth: You are a crew.”
Something we can all agree on is the hope that one day the crew of planet Earth can live in peace and strive together for a better future.
Jake Lloyd Jones
Hawkesbury Marine Rescue
by admin | May 12, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
This is the title of a post that Laurel invited the Board of EGST to read as the new year begins.
She wrote: It speaks to what both Edwin and I know that Elm Grove Trust was called to express through our action as a charity. I believe that we lived the truth being expressed in her article.
It is written by Dr Ilia Delio, the founder of the Center for Christogenesis, based in Washington but with outreach around the world through the internet. Ilia is a Franciscan Sister and an American theologian specialising in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She is a world authority on the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. Brian Swimme wrote of her:
With both passion of the heart and brilliance of the mind, Ilia presents a vision that combines science and spirituality. Her work is rare and precious achievement. She is one of the planetary leaders of our time. The more extensive the reach of her work, the better chance the Earth Community has for a beautiful future.
Her most recent book is The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole.
In this post, The Work of Love, Ilia is responding to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent on January 7th in Minneapolis, news of which went around the world, and which prompted mass protests on the streets. For Ilia, these protests were manifestations of the nature and bonds of our shared humanity. She quoted the physicist David Bohm.
As human beings and societies we seem separate, but in our roots, we are part of an indivisible whole and share in the same cosmic process.
We are fundamentally interconnected, and ‘it took the current political administration to inadvertently catalyse our finest impulses toward solidarity and justice’. ‘What promise resides in our collective dissent’.
But how do we go further than the recurring dynamic that usually accompanies such manifestations, when we go on the streets and give expression to our human solidarity and dignity, demanding justice; and a few months later life is back to what it was. How can such manifestations grasp a vision that brings about a real transformation in who we are and how we live? ‘Without substantive transformation we are living on borrowed time’.
For Ilia, ‘Old religion is not the answer to our problems and indeed may be a source of the great disconnect’. It fights new science while at the same time embracing mechanistic science through new technology. This is all part of why ‘our systems have ceased functioning effectively’. We are trapped in a mechanistic world when we need to grasp the vision of a living world which seeks to understand the whole. We are increasingly disconnected from the natural world in which we have evolved. It is mass movements, such as happened with Renee Good and George Floyd that ‘attract’ a more spontaneous religious feel and expression, which is not about old religious doctrine and dogma but deep concern for what is just and true and is ‘animated by love’. It is interreligous, intercultural, and interracial. ‘Genuine religion …. represents ’the depth dimension – the state of being grasped by ultimate concern that relativizes all lesser concerns. The religious person lives with a passion for life’, something Teilhard de Chardin and others have understood. ‘God constitutes the presence of love-energy creatively united with evolving reality. God is the name of Being, the dynamic, energetic essence of existence itself’.
This is the new religious sensibility emerging in our time, defined by wholistic values and a vision of the whole. It is both contemplative and actively engaging. It is a vision that believes in transformation that does not magically protect from suffering but rather enables suffering to be transfigured into meaning, resistance and renewal, morally and spiritually but also socially and systemically. This is life and energy that emerges ‘from below, self-organising around the call to love’.
This is the call; this is the vision – ‘one honouring contemplative tradition’s depths while demanding radical engagement with injustice, recognising spiritual transformation’s cosmic scope while insisting on concrete acts of love, trusting divine power while acknowledging human agency as essential to divine realisation’.
I hope I have said enough here to interest you in reading the whole of Ilio’s article. You may not agree with everything she says, but you will meet with someone who embraces a sense of wholistic religion that in turn embraces a sense of wholistic science and our One modern world in which we all now live. Nothing is more important at this time when the world is fracturing into segments overruled by essentially lawless men who discount science when it suits them, and claim and use old forms of religion, when it suits them, that no longer have the transforming power to sustain us and hold us all together. Good and true religion is now about how we can live together as one human family on our one little planet, embracing the good, the beautiful and the true while knowing how to manage and mitigate the bad, the ugly and the false. Nothing could be more challenging in every sense. Are we up for it in our own small ways? Laurel and Edwin assure us it is the vision of the Elm Grove Trust.
Here is the link to the article.
by admin | May 12, 2026 | Articles, Newsletter
Angela recently came home from choir practice with a new song they had learnt as a warm up song. I was immediately engaged because of the line ‘You’re a holy place’, but also because it puts our planet ‘out there’ in front of us as a Whole to think about and marvel at.
This pretty planet spinning through space,
You’re a garden, you’re a harbour,
You’re a holy place,
Golden sun going down,
Gentle blue giant spin us around.
All through the night, safe ’til the morning light.
I learnt from Google that ‘It is a beloved children’s folk song written by singersongwriter Tom Chapin and John Forster that celebrates Earth’s beauty and fragility. It was designed to encourage environmental appreciation, serving as a gentle lullaby about the Earth as a “garden” and “harbour” that protects us while spinning through space. The song gained significant fame when it was used to wake up astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-96), including for astronaut John Glenn, emphasizing its theme of seeing the planet from space’.
I have for a long time believed the British astronomer Fred Hoyle’s prediction in 1948, ‘that a photograph of Earth from space would profoundly impact human consciousness’, a cognitive shift similar to that experienced by the astronauts who first viewed Earth from space. ‘They describe a profound sense of awe, a feeling of unity with the planet, and a heightened awareness of its fragility’.
This became more personal for me when I was driving my youngest daughter home from primary school one day, a long time ago. Her class had been watching a film about the planet as seen from space. As she watched she had the thought that she was down there somewhere, running around. The thought was accompanied by strong feelings. Not only was she self consciously aware she was ‘standing’ outside her planetary home, Earth; she was also ‘standing’ outside herself in that ‘home’. They had become objects for her reflection and thought, even as young as she was. She could think about a Whole that included her. Hoyle was right.
The two most iconic photos of Planet Earth are widely considered to be “Earthrise”, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968, and “The Blue Marble”, captured by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. Earthrise shows Earth appearing to rise over the lunar surface, while The Blue Marble is the first complete, clear view of the entire Earth from human hands.
Earthrise
The Blue Marble
We are looking at our planetary Home of which we are all part. We are down there somewhere, running around! We are no longer looking into the heavens with our feet on the ground, as human beings have done from ancient times. We are in the heavens looking down, down to where the whole human race and all of life has lived out its extraordinary story. A bird’s eye view perhaps, but we are where no bird has ever flown. A view from the moon perhaps, but there was a time when there was no moon. A scientific view perhaps, but experiences like goodness and beauty are not formally part of its bailiwick. Some of us might settle for ‘a god’s eye view’, or even a ‘God’s eye view’. But if not perhaps we can at least have a spaceship view from which we can watch in our imagination the passage from at least the beginning of our solar system and the formation of our planets. But better still, so much earlier than this even, from the Big Bang, the singularity that began our Universe and our solar system and our planet in the first place, the event that in fact gave us the time and space, or spacetime, that we all live in; the original singular event that began it all, and of which we are all part – all of us, everyone of us on this our planet. One planet, One story, One human race. We are all Earthlings together.
I am now not sure Fred Hoyle was right, or if he was, not everyone has heard the good news, particularly some of our world leaders. Perhaps they should all be put into spaceships and taken into space to look for themselves. Photographs are clearly not enough to affect their primary sense of identity. They are still primarily Russian, or American, or Israeli, or Iranian. That is no longer enough if we are going to survive as One human race on One little planet. Being human needs to be primary, Earthlings together. If we can all get over our egos and find a deeper foundation within ourselves we can make it. Perhaps the real battle going on is in our collective human consciousness, and perhaps small groups like the Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust have a role to play in moving that consciousness forward.