Andrew Clover, secret druid

Transcript

As you may remember, I asked Andrew Clover if he would be interested in doing a very short interview using WhatsApp voice notes. Here’s his response.

I’m just replying to the first, well actually the second WhatsApp message. I’m ready to be interviewed, JP.

Oh… I’m at the bus stop outside Belgian Chips. It’s quite remarkable how many people there are in the world, isn’t it? And how many of them are quite eccentric. That’s my observation.

Is my interview appearing in vocal form like this, or am I texting? I’m happy to do either. And thank you for sending me three messages – the trouble with being at a bus stop is that you have to wait quite a long time, so I’m delighted to have three messages from you in my own little personal broadcast. I’ll pop this one off, then get to the end of message two and see what else you’ve got for me.

Ah, thank you. Lovely question.

I’m working on a strange idea called Tree Calm. I think that if you want to be happier, nothing is more likely to give you calm and clarity than leaning against a tree and taking a few deep breaths. I’ve been secretly doing this for years. I’m basically a secret druid.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been organising a group to do it with me, and this week was our third time. So I went off to the forest, and in a sense it was a disaster. The middle of a forest is, by definition, not a great place to broadcast from – not great Wi-Fi.

But I led a meditation on the rowan tree, which is a tree of healing. It heals us by teaching us: I have power because I connect. It’s a meditation I’ve done many times, leaning on a rowan tree. You imagine all your roots linking under the soil to another tree, and then you start to think of all the people to whom you are linked. (Sometimes I think of you, JP, as a good-natured helper in my life.) You see yourself ringed by these helpers, and you get this fuzzy, warm sense of gratitude.

I offered it to my group and, goddammit, it worked. An hour later, when I saw their little faces on the WhatsApp video, they were all beaming and smiling.

So that’s the strange idea I’m working on. It’s an odd one, but sometimes you have to do what you truly love, don’t you?

Ah, I see I’ve broken the rule on my first attempt – that was more than a minute. Do I do a second take, or is that against the spirit of the project? Who knows. I’ll do a second take, and it probably won’t have the same authentic freshness. Well, I’ll stop this.

The first time I spoke to Andrew Clover.

jp at this domain name.