Apple+TV

The Year Earth Changed

July 26, 2021

‘Narrated by David Attenborough, this timely documentary special takes a look at nature’s extraordinary response to a year of global lockdown. This love letter to planet Earth will take you from hearing birdsong in deserted cities for the first time in decades, to witnessing whales communicating in ways never before seen.

Produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit, directed by Tom Beard, and executive produced by Mike Gunton and Alice Keens-Soper.’

AppleTV+

“One of the first documentary reflections of our strange times.”

Dayle, here. At once heartbreaking and hopeful. Not hopeful in a passive sense, as in ‘some day,’ but now. Together. Living not in dominance over, but interconnection with our planet, our species, all living beings.

Pause.

Reflect.

Our planet is gorgeous, alive, breathing. Pulsing with birth.

And it is burning. We are destroying it in present tense.

Life is being extinguished. We saw how the earth changed in days, weeks, and months early in global lockdowns WITHOUT the interaction of our destructive beings…humans. Carl Jung: “Man won’t deviate the original pattern of his being.” Is this, then, destruction?

We can give permanent pause, space, quiet, and tender mercies in our practices and consciousness, asking, what can I do in my corner of the sky? (Nod to Valarie Kaur.)

We must.

I had so much hope for our planet, for each other, in the early days of this current pandemic, our isolation. It quickly faded when the pause became political, when health and care became virtue signaling, when science became overridden by misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, hate, disorder, power, and greed.

As a collective human body the focus became on getting ‘back to normal’ instead of shifting to what’s possible. What’s necessary.

We’re on the edge, balancing destruction with possibility. Let’s choose possibility. All of us.

The food we eat.

The cars we drive.

The Energy we use.

The resources we deplete.

The privilege we strive to achieve at the expense of other.

I want to believe there is still time.

And I want to protect all that thrived when we were silent and away.

Let’s give Gaia a chance to live, heal, and breathe. She’s given us so many.

In the silence, did you hear? Did you hear the birdsong? Did you see the animals congregate and communicate? Did you know the whales could hear again? The Himalayas could be seen again?

The future of the natural world is co-existing. We must do the one thing we can do, interconnected, to shift the planet back to health, as we inadvertently did in our absence, the year earth changed.

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From Maria Popova, sharing a BBC interview with Carl Jung from 1959:

“…the only danger that exists is man himself — he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man — far too little. We are the origin of all coming evil [30:27].”

John Freeman and his team filmed the interview at Jung’s house at Küsnacht (near Zurich, Switzerland) in march 1959, it was broadcast in Great Britain on october 22, 1959. This film has undouptedly brought Jung to more people than any other piece of journalism and any of Jung’s own writings. Freeman was deputy editor at the “New Statesman” at the time of the interview. They formed a friendship, that continued until Jung’s death. -posted by ‘peacefulness’ on YouTube.

Jung: “We need more psychology, more study of human nature.”

We need Gaia’s nature, she does not need us. -dayle