The Story Behind the Name
This Is Earth

This Is Earth:
Where Every Life Becomes a Story.

For as long as I can remember, people have asked me the same question:

Why This Is Earth?

To answer, I start somewhere small—back in the garden of the house where I grew up.

I was small enough that the garden felt enormous, watching a line of ants carry grains of soil twice their size.






In that quiet moment, a thought arrived—one far too heavy for a child to carry:

Why was I born into this world?
What is the reason I exist at all?

I did not have an answer then.
I am not sure I fully have one now.





These questions never left me, and in many ways, they are among the reasons this project exists.

Some years later, a teacher I knew through my family set up a telescope at the foot of a nearby mountain and let us look at the rings of Saturn.  






I remember the cold air.
The quiet.
And the strange comfort of realizing how small I was.

That night opened a door I never closed.

Why do black holes exist?
What happens at a singularity?
How is it possible that the stars we see tonight
are showing us light that began its journey
long before this moment ever existed?

Standing beneath a sky that old and that vast, I often wondered what one person could possibly matter.

And yet, somehow,
I have always believed the opposite.

That even the smallest life carries the power to change something real.

Not long after, before a choir competition at school, our class watched a video of musicians performing a song created to support people in Africa.






I do not remember every detail, but I remember what it awakened in me.





It stirred a longing I did not yet have words for—the desire to create something that could reach into another person’s life and leave it a little better than it was.






That moment planted a seed of purpose, one that has guided me ever since.

As my world grew wider, I kept meeting people whose values and ways of seeing life were nothing like mine.






Sometimes those differences caused friction.
Sometimes conflict.






But I learned something by remaining within that discomfort instead of running from it:

When we choose to understand differences
instead of fearing them,
life opens in directions
we could never have planned.

The starlight above us tonight began its journey long before we were born.




In a sense, looking up is looking backward.
But I did not build this project to look backward.

I built it to leave something forward—
a light someone may find later.

Not to explain the past, but to remind them of a day they lived, and to hand them back a little strength for the day still ahead.

This is where the idea meets the work we do.
This Is Earth records twelve unedited minutes.




No retakes.
No script.





Because no two lives are the same, no two voices carry the same weight, and no two twelve-minute recordings will ever be alike.

Editing would smooth away
the one thing worth keeping.

So we do not edit.

We let the twelve minutes be exactly what they were.

It is each unrepeatable life that makes this Earth worth calling beautiful.

That is what I set out to preserve.

Not the planet as a subject, but the people living on it—one recording at a time.

Because here is something I have noticed.





The act of sitting down and speaking honestly about your own life does something to you before it ever reaches anyone else.

It hands you back to yourself.

That is the whole purpose behind this project—nothing more complicated than that.





I hope it helps someone love themselves a little more.

I hope it gives them a quiet moment in which they can say, simply:

This is who I am.

Every recorded life becomes a thread in the larger story of this planet.

Put enough threads together, and you get the Earth’s own story—written by the people who actually lived it.

That is why I chose this name.

This Is Earth.

This is the Earth we call home.
And somewhere in your twelve minutes,
it is also you.

「This Is Earth」という名前に込めた物語