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.