Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. I’ve done about 535 of them now. And if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to the past interviews menu on batgap.com – b a t g a p. Oh, What’s my name? My name’s Rick Archer. Hi. And that’s Irene over there, filling in the essential gaps in the information. Another essential thing that I always say is that this program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you’d like to support it there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site and there’s also a page of other ways to contribute if you don’t like dealing with PayPal. My guest today is Clare Dubois. Clare is the founder and CEO of TreeSisters.org, a global women’s movement spanning over 200 countries, which has collectively funded the planting of over 8 million trees. TreeSisters is a social change movement and a tropical reforestation organization working towards normalizing cultural reciprocity with nature. The aim of both Clare and TreeSisters is to make it as normal to give back to nature as it currently is to take nature for granted, while supporting humanity in its transition from a consumer species to a restorer species. Before founding TreeSisters, Clare worked internationally for over two decades, coaching business leaders and facilitating group behavior change processes in multiple sectors. Known for her direct, catalytic energy, her inspirational speaking and her holistic approach to collective transformation, Clare is a walking invitation to anyone ready to step up and step in on behalf of the planet. Now, having read that little bio, I just want to say that I’ve had the privilege of listening to, I don’t know, seven or eight hours of Clare’s other interviews and talks over the past week, much of it while walking in the woods amongst trees, and it’s really been a delight. Clare has a really interesting story. At first when I considered doing this interview I thought, “well how’s this going to fit into the BatGap theme?” You know, spiritual awakening and all that. I’m convinced it’ll fit very well now having gotten to know Clare. Also, people who’ve watched this show before know that I don’t consider spirituality to be divorced in any way from everything that’s happening in the world, the problems the world is having and the solutions it could have and so on and so forth. I think it’s inextricably intertwined. Whatever level of consciousness is ambient or prevalent in human, in society is going to show up in the world at large and there seems to be a shift in consciousness happening in a good direction, but a lot of shaking up seems to be in the works in order for the effects of that to percolate up and change everything that needs to be changed. And Clare is very articulate on this topic, so, let’s get rolling. Aren’t you Clare?
Irene Archer: And what’s your name?
Rick Archer: Oh, What’s my name? My name’s Rick Archer. Hi. And that’s Irene over there, filling in the essential gaps in the information. Another essential thing that I always say is that this program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you’d like to support it there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site and there’s also a page of other ways to contribute if you don’t like dealing with PayPal. My guest today is Clare Dubois. Clare is the founder and CEO of TreeSisters.org, a global women’s movement spanning over 200 countries, which has collectively funded the planting of over 8 million trees. TreeSisters is a social change movement and a tropical reforestation organization working towards normalizing cultural reciprocity with nature. The aim of both Clare and TreeSisters is to make it as normal to give back to nature as it currently is to take nature for granted, while supporting humanity in its transition from a consumer species to a restorer species. Before founding TreeSisters, Clare worked internationally for over two decades, coaching business leaders and facilitating group behavior change processes in multiple sectors. Known for her direct, catalytic energy, her inspirational speaking and her holistic approach to collective transformation, Clare is a walking invitation to anyone ready to step up and step in on behalf of the planet. Now, having read that little bio, I just want to say that I’ve had the privilege of listening to, I don’t know, seven or eight hours of Clare’s other interviews and talks over the past week, much of it while walking in the woods amongst trees, and it’s really been a delight. Clare has a really interesting story. At first when I considered doing this interview I thought, “well how’s this going to fit into the BatGap theme?” You know, spiritual awakening and all that. I’m convinced it’ll fit very well now having gotten to know Clare. Also, people who’ve watched this show before know that I don’t consider spirituality to be divorced in any way from everything that’s happening in the world, the problems the world is having and the solutions it could have and so on and so forth. I think it’s inextricably intertwined. Whatever level of consciousness is ambient or prevalent in human, in society is going to show up in the world at large and there seems to be a shift in consciousness happening in a good direction, but a lot of shaking up seems to be in the works in order for the effects of that to percolate up and change everything that needs to be changed. And Clare is very articulate on this topic, so, let’s get rolling. Aren’t you Clare?
Clare Dubois: No pressure.
Rick Archer: None whatsoever. I was thinking maybe the way we could do this is there’s a lot of stories you’ve told a thousand times, but you still tell them in a fresh way and most of my listeners will not have heard them so you’re going to have to tell some of those, but I’ll interject and ask questions and make comments and so on. And I was thinking, you can do this any way you like but I was thinking that we should start with some of the highlights or milestones that led up to your car crash and then you’ll talk about the car crash, and we’ll take it from there. If that’s the way you want to do it. You can do it any way you like.
Clare Dubois: OK I’ll play the game however you want to play it. In terms of in terms of milestones are you meaning like the probably what would be the steps along the path that took me to where I am now like the specific things that happened?
Rick Archer: Well as specific as you want to be like, for instance, I was listening to you this morning while walking across a golf course actually, and you were talking about your father and how kind of repressive and controlling and so on he was but you were actually I don’t know if you did this to extent I even would, but I kind of got the feeling like, I thought of my own life, you know, with an alcoholic, abusive father. But I sort of feel like they’re all as well and wisely put in a lot of times these difficult things happen to us. And it turns out decades later, we have a feeling like, oh, yeah, you know, if that hadn’t happened, I might not be where I am today, and things are going pretty well now. So, you know, we there’s sort of a wisdom to the stuff we all go through.
Clare Dubois: Well, I mean, yeah, let’s, let’s start with the really difficult stuff.
Rick Archer: Okay.
Clare Dubois: So, yeah, no, if I hadn’t had the upbringing, I had three sisters wouldn’t exist. I’m pretty sure about that.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So I mean,
Clare Dubois: yeah. And I do feel like, you know, depending on what your belief systems are, depending on how you perceive karma, depending on whether you believe that the sort of, let’s say the contrast that you’ve experienced in the first few years of your life are very instructive in forming that sort of basic nervous system imprinting, that that paves the way for the theme of your life, a certain theme of my first nine years was how many ways can you trash a female and, and he started very violently, very young, like he started when I was a baby
Rick Archer: hitting you. But that was
Clare Dubois: very violent, Yeah, just violent. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say he probably I probably say, my father tried to find as many ways as he could of sort of experimenting on how close to death a child could be before getting like before they survived, like, I have severe internal injuries from my father, not just the physical kind, emotional kind, the sexual kind. But I, you know, I think of him as my teacher. It took a while it took a long while, I would say I was almost completely hooked in victim consciousness for the first probably 38 years of my life. Trying to transition for 10 of those years, like really aware that that’s where I was, and doing everything in my power to get out. But what it did was, you know, I say to people, if you haven’t been lost, then you’ve never experienced the pure joy of being found, or finding, finding your way. And when you’ve systematically had every part of yourself that you value, like hacked up, that isn’t, there’s no part of you that doesn’t feel really badly damaged, then your life like I could say, my life has been, it’s been a life of recovery. Like, you have to painstakingly reclaim every element of yourself. And when you do that, and you have to, you have to carve your way through what is not true, that you have interpreted to be true, when you have to, like cast out the lies, and then find an aspect of yourself. When you find it. It’s so priceless. It Like It, it brings your consciousness deeply into it. And so it cannot be taken for granted. So I’ve I have like crawled my way back to being what I would call a sane, functional human being, although some people would probably question it, and, and to somebody that I actually like being into somebody that has, I’ve had to work through so many levels of fear, like I was crippled with fear as a child. Absolutely. I grew up in a state of high high terror. And so, you know, when I did have the car crash, and I was given Tree Sisters, which we’ll talk about in more depth later on probably the, the reality was, it was asking me to, at the time, turn myself inside out, I was a complete introvert. And I really believed that that’s what I was. But I actually I was an introvert through nurture, not through nature. You know, I’d been taught that hiding was the way to survive. And so when you’re asked to become the front person of a movement, or to become a leader, when you’ve never even run a team before or, I do all the things that I was asked to do. It was like you are not just asking the wrong person, you’re actually trying to talk to me all over again. But essentially, really what it was was, do you want to stay wrapped up in the shape that you are made through the circumstances of your life? Or do you want to discover that you are something completely radically different and that no matter what the circumstances of your life, your soul or your essence is entirely something else, is free, is life, is love, is not ashamed is not all contorted in its insecurities, is something completely other and I remember like being at that juncture where it was like, okay, what am I going to buy into my neuroticism and my insecurity? Or the possibility that there is some, there is some version of myself that I have no clue what it is, but that is led by love rather than fear. And that can move into service on behalf of life rather than figuring out what’s the least I can do so that I can stay invisible and safe, like: what am I going to do? Bow to my fear about my love and love won and love won not because it was for myself, but it was for the planet, which is my primary passion in life. And that was really ingenious for spirit because it would, it could pull me through all my nightmares because of my love of planet. And then in doing that, of course, there’s no separation between self, other self, and nature. So it sort of brought me through the back door back to myself. And so yeah, I, I would not have been so sensitized to what I call repressed potential, in others, especially repressed potential in women, unless I could not stomach the suppressed potential in myself. And that was my father’s gift to me, my father’s gift to me was finding any level of what I call inauthentic, feminine behavior, that has to do with being conditioned or frightened of being too much or frightened or being too little or, or self-betraying to compromise to make it alright, for the masculine. It was like, my relationship to patriarchy was imprinted heavily by my father to be something that I just saw as unacceptable in our world, like, I’m just not, I’m not willing for this to be the full expression of humanity, because it’s not, it’s not a full expression. It’s not, it doesn’t call out the best of us. It doesn’t, it doesn’t move us into the expression of our souls, it doesn’t, doesn’t liberate us. And it sure as hell doesn’t take care of people or planet. So yeah, my father’s gift,
Rick Archer: Yeah, Two thoughts come to mind. One is, you know, those that will say like that, as the parent beats you, I’m doing this for your own good, I wouldn’t let your story excuse that kind of behavior in case anyone feels like, they’re, they’re behaving that way. And they’re doing it for somebody’s good. I mean, that that has its own karma. And that the second thing that comes to mind is just that, you know, it’s almost a cliche, but many people say we have a calling, you know, a purpose for which we came into this world. And some even say that we pre-determined the circumstances into which we’re born so as to facilitate the, the finding of that calling, and you know, the fulfillment of it. And
Clare Dubois: I think so
Rick Archer: Yeah. And you strike me as being a person who very much has a calling, and who, who got hints and indications of that calling a number of times over the years, but it eventually just sort of clicked in a way that you could no longer ignore.
Clare Dubois: You know, I just want to go back to one of the things that you said, no abuse of children is acceptable. No, no abusive of Anyone, frankly, is acceptable, no abuse of the forest is acceptable, no abuse of our waters is acceptable. I mean, we kind of go children, but how is the children how was a child different to an ocean? You know, in my, in my, in my perception, when you’re no longer living in a place of, well, there’s humans, and then there’s nature. You know, humans are part of nature, we’re part of a woven tapestry. So any abuse over any level of unconscious separation that allows us to perceive ourselves as somehow superior or separate from and therefore able to do what we want with this thing without having any relationship to it is not, let’s just say is not the highest expression of what we could be. But when it comes to shifting, shifting victim consciousness, which all of us I believe, will be having to do, because our world in the guise of patriarchy is, it’s in the shape of perpetrator and victim. Therefore, you’ve got addiction on both sides when it comes to the masculine and the feminine. And I say that because this is not just about men and women, this is about the aspects of ourselves Inside ourselves, which also play these games, you know, that, that shifting out of perpetrator and victim mentality, at its most fundamental level, to me, we’re talking about being able to perceive things as they are, as opposed to how we interpret them. So for instance, when it comes to my father, yes, I interpreted myself as evil, loathsome, useless, at fault, all the rest of it, that was my interpretation. And I was wounded because I took it personally. It’s the act of taking it personally. The act of taking anything personally that I think is the is one of the greatest areas that spirituality at large for me seems to miss. It’s like it. It’s one of the most crucial things that we can learn to witness another doing whatever the hell they want to do to us and understand that it’s not about us. It’s about it’s about the other and therefore, no longer being in the mindset where we take it personally. Now, I don’t. At a global level now, we need to be able to distinguish the difference between a culture that has been imposed on us which is killing our planet. And that we are woven into in a in a convenience-oriented consciousness that we can’t imagine it any other way. And the birthing of something completely other that needs to come through us that is not at the expense of life. And it’s not at the expense of ourselves. And that means it’s not actually, again, it’s not actually about us, this isn’t personal. And yet, it’s entire, it’s intensely personal because something else has to come through us. And to me, that’s the greatest spiritual awakening that needs to happen right now is stepping out of this patriarchal world that also says, the white man on the big chair over there is going to sort it out for us, especially if he’s got really bad hair. And then, but actually, the, the growth and the awakening and the shifting into personal responsibility and the growing up and the no longer looking for Daddy over there to sort it out for us, means that there is something that needs to come through each of us that contributes to this awakening. It’s all of ours, it belongs in all of our hands.
Rick Archer: Trump actually played into that meme during his campaign is that, you know, I’m the only one who can fix this. I’m the only one who knows how to fix this. And people bought into it, because they saw him firing people on TV for 10 years, you know, being authoritative.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. And why do we want like, what is it about like Daddy or shadow daddy, that has us somehow feels safe? Like, what is it in us that doesn’t want to grow up, doesn’t want to actually say, You know what, I need to step into some sort of leadership? There’s something inside of me, that actually fundamentally disagrees with this person, because we’re like, we’re woven into someone else’s going to save me, someone else is going to take make it better. Technology’s going to save us something other than Me is going to save us. And actually, that is the malaise that is anchoring the sixth system in place. And we have no concept of what a collective shift of consciousness that that moves us into collaborative leadership could actually do on this planet. But we’re gonna have to let go of daddy, you know, or mummy and look at what does collective leadership actually look like? What does grassroots responsibility actually look like?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I don’t want to get too political here. But you know, one of Bernie’s campaign themes is not me, us. And he kind of prides himself on getting these $2.70 cent donations, you know, lots of them as opposed to big super PAC money thing.
Clare Dubois: Well, that’s how we’ve almost planted 9 million trees. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it’s been $5 here and $10 there. And I’m regularly saying to remember talking to Starhawk. And saying to her, you know, good would you come on, and an advisor to Tree Sisters and her saying, Thank God, you’re doing this, so that I don’t have to. And I was like, that’s the wrong answer. Like, I’m not doing this, this is not me, I might be the mad one at the front banging the drum. But when my network of women all around the world say, we’ll be the wind under your wings, I’m like, I don’t want you to be the wind under my wings, you need to be the feathers on the bird. You know, this belongs to all of us. What is this automatic handing over of responsibility that we seem to do that says, I do it. David Attenborough, Nelson Mandela, you know, these incredible leaders like I’m so I’m so afraid when, when David Attenborough goes like to me, he’s a, he’s a being on this planet that holds the planet when he when he does go, we’re all going to have to pick up their mantle. Polly Higgins when she went when you know, Stop Ecocide was sitting in her hands. And it’s like, okay, now we all pick up the mantle. You know, yes, I’m standing for the trees. But more. I’m I my reason for being is to try and turn a key in as many people as possible that helps them realize that they’re a leader.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s great. You know, when you say, you know, you’re not doing it, all of your people are doing it. Even in a different sense. Do you do often have the feeling that even as you’re doing things, you have the feeling like I’m not doing this, you know, there’s something bigger than me, that’s kind of the puppeteer here. I’m just sort of cooperating.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, I often think of it as I’m a chess piece on a chess board. And somebody’s much bigger than me, as is moving the pieces around, and I’m just kind of sort of wandering around going, oh, oh, okay. Oh, it’s you. Oh. But I also feel like, increasingly, I think of the trees as the global brain, on this planet. And increasingly, as I drop into a more conscious relationship with them, and as increasingly as we, as a species understand how the forest floor operates and how the, you know, the profound interconnectedness of everything like trees can teach us how to live. And as I, when you start to understand that each species of tree is in communication with a different planet, that they’re actually bringing in cosmic energy, and they’re spreading it around and, and it literally is like the synapses of a brain. And when you look at a brain, it’s a massive tree, when you look at the brainstem, it’s trees, when you look at the lungs or circulatory system, everything were full of trees. So they are a fundamental relationship of ours. And I increasingly feel that I am literally being moved around by them. And my actual, my, and our understanding of the consciousness of nature is so lacking, profoundly lacking, because we have elevated ourselves into a dominant position and acted as if nature is just something to use, rather than something that we are in dynamic relationship with and belong to. And I don’t think we understand what we are. I don’t think we understand what it is. I don’t think we understand the relationship between the two, I don’t think we have a clue what can come through us and the way that some of the, you know, indigenous tribes in this world understand how to be in profound relationship with the natural world. Yeah, it’s some we’re inside a mystery. You know, I think of spirituality or my, my path of spirituality, it was always like, is life trying to become aware of itself through me? You know, well, I think the natural world is trying to help us become aware of what we actually are as a part of nature. Because when you are in the awareness of being part of there is no abuse of, there’s no power over this just power through. And I think that’s, that’s one of the biggest gateways that we’re standing at right now is a complete redefinition of what a human being actually is. And then a falling into sufficient humility to move into intimate relationship with nature so that we can discover what actual intimacy and creativity is all about.
Rick Archer: Wow, beautiful. I’ve got goose bumps several times as you were speaking. I don’t cry that easily, but that’s your job. But I get goosebumps.
Clare Dubois: If you’ve watched 8 hours of me and have seen me cry a lot,
Rick Archer: I’ve heard you at least, and I usually convert it to audio. There are several threads I want to pick up on from what you just said. One is the truth communicating with each other. I’ve seen Paul Stamets speak about the mycelium, you know that that interweaves the forest floor and that there’s god, there’s like miles of it in a cubic centimeter of Earth, and it’s just this network in the in the tree, you can want you to take it from here and explain how the trees help each other and communicate with each other it’d be worth touching on that.
Clare Dubois: Well, I mean, the reality is, as we know it thus far, you know, I think we’re just going to keep going down the rabbit hole and realizing that there is so much going on. But the fungi is like the How would you say it’s like the circulatory system and the communication system of the of the forest. So every tree is dynamically connected to every other tree, both by their roots, they will root onto each other, but the fungi also, the mycorrhizal actually links them. Now the mycorrhizal or the fungi itself is what spits out acid onto rock and then turns it into minerals. So the fungi basically gathers the minerals and helps to create the soil. Now the trees are creating the starch. So what you’ve got are starch loving fungi, that are creating minerals, and starch creating trees that need minerals. And so they basically start swapping. So there’s a so there’s a swapping between, there’s like a fundamental dynamic relationship between the fungi and the trees that enables the trees to feed the fungi and the fungi to feed the trees. But what you’ve also got, and this is why I call it the global brain, you’ve got the reality that the trees in a forest take care of each other, they nurture each other, they feed each other. They send signals to each other, and they use the mycorrhizal in order to be able to do that. So if you’ve got conifers and deciduous in a forest, in the wintertime, the conifers are generating carbon, they will feed the deciduous neighbors who aren’t because they’ve dropped their leaves. When the deciduous start to grow their leaves, if they start to block out the conifers, then they will basically start to feed back the other way. Similarly, if you’ve got bugs, attacking pathogens, attacking beetles attacking at one end of the forest, they will send out chemical signals, which will also run that will warn everybody else change your chemistry, see if you can basically block the bugs. Why are they doing that? They’re doing that because a forest is as healthy as its entire community. If one of the trees starts to go down, then they’re all threatened, not just in terms of pathogen but also in terms of when a tree dies, and it create … or it comes down or it’s cut down and there’s a gap in the canopy, then the wind can get in and start uprooting. So they understand at the most physiological level that For all of them to survive, all of them need to, they need to take care of everyone, you know, they don’t have this superiority mentality that we do, where it’s okay to drive through LA. And see God knows how many outrageously wealthy mansions and then more homeless people than I’ve ever seen. Like, the forest can’t do that, because one is no better than the other, they take care of each other to ensure that everybody is healthy. And to me, that’s one of the fundamental reasons why we need to turn to nature as a teacher, rather than just be their dominators and torturers, you know, the more we can learn from the natural world, the more I think nature will teach us how to be the highest expression of humanity, that we could actually be, because there’s a version of humanity that would only take care of future generations. And we know that because most of the indigenous people on our planet live like that, they live in order to perpetuate at least seven generations, but certainly, the natural world and everybody that comes after them, our generation is basically normalized stealing from the future stealing from our kids. And even though the kids are now taking to the streets saying what the hell, we’re still going, No, let’s perpetuate the same economy that requires the death of nature in order to thrive. No, we’re not, you know, it’s like, what it must be like to be a child now. An awake child, you know, we wonder why there’s so much drug addiction and addiction to devices and all the rest of it, like who wants to actually be wide awake to the level of enormous disregard that’s going on now. And the future that’s coming is a reflection of the consciousness that we’ve been prepared to contribute to. And this is why, you know, right at the beginning of this interview, and you were saying, how might Claire Dubois be part of BatGap when it’s about spirituality?
Rick Archer: Well, that was before I got to know you.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, I know, I know. But unless the spiritual beings, the so-called spiritual beings of our planet, or those that are meditating for hours a day, are those that are on profound spiritual journeys, unless they, all of us can open that like, flush out the wing of the birds that we are, that embraces all of life, our one individual journey, yes, it might be fabulous for our soul. And yes, we may incarnate onto a healthier planet next time around, or whatever the hell it is that we believe in. But we we’ve incarnated onto this planet. Now, this is where we are at this point in time, which has to be one of the most nail-biting moments in human history. Because this isn’t just war happening to us or Naziism happening to us or whatever happening to us, this is us, destroying life as we know it. And preventing our planet from being able to maintain her circularity system in order to provide the weather that we need in order to in order to survive, let alone thrive, we’re doing this to ourselves, there is there has to be a shift in consciousness, a massive one. And therefore, the meditators of our world, the dancers of our world, those that are, know how to move their consciousness in their physiology in a way to alter their state, we need every single one of you waking up to the fact that there is no separation between you and the natural world. And that while she is being hacked apart, unless we’re willing to put our consciousness into her body, and allow her to communicate through us, and allow her to lead us in some way that actually has our action start to make sense on behalf of life, not to me, wholly a spiritual journey, it’s a, it’s a disconnected one, because it’s not actually contributing to the continuation of life in our world.
Rick Archer: Brilliant. We were using the word “abuse” a little while ago. And as we were using that I was, you know, picking it apart and thinking, Okay, “AB use” using something improperly. And I was thinking, Well, okay, well, if we’re abusing someone or abusing the world in some way, then we’re using it improperly. And why are we doing that we’re doing that because we don’t see it in its essential value. We don’t see it as actually part of us, we part of it, we don’t see the oneness, which is the actual reality of the situation. And you know, you wouldn’t sort of cut your own finger, you know, because you see it as part of you. But we’re doing that to nature, because we see it as dead, inanimate, separate, unconscious, unconscious stuff, you know, and they’re these misinterpretations of the Bible, like, you know, what was it “I grant you stewardship”, or, I don’t know, over nature and so on and so forth. It sort of has this patriarchal tone to it, like, you know, this is just a resource to be used for our pleasure, our convenience, rather than something holy something, you know, something as imbued with God as any saint has ever been, which needs to be treated accordingly.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, when I One of the really interesting things about moving to America for me, has been being able to hang out with First Nations people from, you know, Native Americans here from Alaska from Colombia, from the jungle, the Amazon jungle from Hawaii. And I, for a while, I couldn’t put words to what it was that I could feel that was so profoundly different. But I cried every time now, okay, I’m a crier. But when I cry, it’s because my body is recognizing something. And it’s signaling to me. And it’s signaling a loss or a lack or a pain or a yearning or a longing. And it moves through me in tears. And they’re in it’s the way that I can’t miss it. Like something is there, my body is telling me and what I experienced with them all was they’re not separate from the land, and not separate from their lineages. They honor their bloodlines like I’ve never like I was never taught, you know, there’s so much dysfunction in my family line, all I wanted to do was sever myself from them, or without any consciousness that I was severing like the river of consciousness that ran through my own bloodline, I just wanted to, like, cut off everything and make myself safe. And in doing so, I cut off one of the primary routes, blood routes of my own existence, but then they also belong to the land, they belong to the land. We don’t know what that actually means. We only know land as belonging to us. But when you start to experience, nature as all your relations, when you realize that the buffalo are your relations, and the cows are your relations and the hummingbirds are your relations, well, you don’t put chickens in cages. You don’t. You know, overfish the oceans, you don’t cut down the trees because they’re all your relations. And they are, they’re your family. Now, I was noticed,
Rick Archer: Remember what Jesus said, Whatsoever you do unto the least of these you do unto me,
Clare Dubois: yeah. And I was I was, I’ve suffered from a lot of ill health in my life. And I’ve started noticing, like, I’m hurting, because there are no bees on, there’s like flowers everywhere around me. And there’s no bees, like that hurt, like I’m supposed to be living in the sound of the bees, and the absence of the sound of the bees is hurting me. Like when sandhill cranes we flew right underneath the flight path of the Sandhill cranes, when they go over and they listen to their call, I can track the part of my body that directly relates to them, and that knows them. And I think this body of this human being that I am, is designed to live in a world with all the other species of which they are a part of me, and I’m a part of them, you know, they have found that inside of what they call the so-called junk DNA of a human being of the DNA of every other living thing on this planet. So we are encoded with life. Now, I just want to go back to one of the things you were saying around abuse, I found it really fascinating for myself, that as a thoroughly abused being, I managed to somehow move myself into Nevada City, which is the center of the gold rush. And onto some of the most abused land, and, you know, the, the sight of total genocide. So where I live, if you killed a native Indian, you were given, you know, $1.20 per scalp for the privilege of killing one of the natives, these people who lived in complete reciprocity with the land, you know, it was like it was a good thing to wipe them out, not just wipe them out, but with the mentality that I want that thing, I want that goal, that gold will give me something. In order to get that gold or in order to get that pleasure that you want from doing what you want to that child or whatever level of abuse it is that you’re doing, you have to not be able to see the child, you have to not be able to see the sacredness, you have to be able to forget that it’s your daughter, you have to be able to forget any social norms. You have to not be able to see the forest, not be able to see the Indians, not be able to see the beauty of the place, not be able to recognize the sacredness of a river. To destroy the whole lot just to get the gold and believe that that’s a good thing. That level of abuse. It’s not just that we don’t see everything as sacred. But it has to be a pain in us a deep level of pain in us that can inflict that level of pain on other, whether it’s human and animal or mineral and not find it wrong. So, and I think that deepest of wounds that enables us to blindly stay numb, numb enough to keep perpetuating the destruction, is our mother wound and when I say our mother wound, it’s our fundamental severance from the planet of which we are a part. Because we are born part of this planet. We’re made of her we’re breathing her. There is no indivisibility. We don’t exist outside of her. We are completely made of her. When we poison her water, we poison our own bodies. When we poison the air, we poison ourselves like we think we can poison everything and get away with it. Well, we’re all dying. Cancer levels are off the charts. Autism levels are skyrocketing. Why? Because we’re pouring metal from the sky. It’s in our water. We’re all getting metal poisoning. It’s like, there’s nothing to be surprised about in the level of mental and emotional and physical sickness that’s going on. But what is it a reflection of? To me, it’s a reflection of a profound level of disconnection due to a severance from our own nature as nature that is so painful, we do not know how to go back home to ourselves. So what are we doing, we’re killing indigenous people as fast as we possibly can around the planet? Why? Because they’re in the way of our perpetuating business as normal, greed as normal, dominance as normal, because they hold the sacred seeds of pure sanity, they hold the memory of what it means to live in relationship with nature as nature. So they are our absolute lifeline back to sanity, they’re our path home.
Rick Archer: When you were saying that one thing that occurred to me and see if you agree with this is that I suspect that when you’re inflicting pain on someone, or on environment, or on an ocean, or whatever kind of damage you’re doing, on some deep level, you, you must be inflicting an equal amount of pain on yourself. Because we’re all connected on a deep level. But you but you have to pile on an adequate amount of numbness, to not feel that. Like, you know, that old “forgive them father, they know that what they do”, you couldn’t allow yourself to feel that or you else you wouldn’t be able to continue doing it. So there must be a I can’t I don’t know why I’m quoting the Bible so much today. There was like when the when the Israelites were being persecuted, you know, they kept saying, the Bible kept saying, well, the pharaoh then hardened his heart, and then he was able to do this. So we kind of have to harden our hearts and pile on a lot of numbness in order to continue to behave this way.
Clare Dubois: Yeah Yeah,
Rick Archer: yeah,
Clare Dubois: Absolutely. And, and that’s one of the reasons why I think it was tree sisters, as opposed to tree people.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah.
Clare Dubois: Because I fought against it being tree sisters, I didn’t understand. And then I as the path, sort of, as it started to show itself to me, and I looked at the treatment of women. And I looked at our emotionality and how much that has been shamed and belittled and, you know, made out to be weak. And I thought, you know, what stronger, somebody that basically refuses to feel anything because it’s too traumatic and is violent over the top of that, or somebody that could collapse in a heap on the floor, bawl her eyes out until such time as she can fully feel her connection to the thing that she’s crying for and then steps up and takes action. You know, emotionality has been trashed on this planet. That’s why I say the feminine has been repressed not just women, the feminine is considered less than because it is instinctual, and intuitive and so harder to measure, and it is emotional, therefore, it is harder to control. Both those things to me are a different kind of strength. They are an extremely different kind of strength than, how strong are my muscles? You know, what can I pick up? Who can I protect? And so the masculine forms of strength and the feminine forms of strength are designed to completely complement each other one is no better, no stronger than the other. Our attributes are fundamentally different, and all of them are vital. But what’s happened in our world is the, you know, patriarchy is not the masculine. Patriarchy is the shadow masculine. And only the shadow masculine would stand on the throat of the feminine and consider that healthy. That makes sense to the shadow masculine that needs to needs to put somebody else down in order to think of himself as superior. The Healthy masculine is as much in service to life, the feminine, husbanding life into its fullness. The Healthy masculine is the most exquisite thing you know, but it also knows that the healthy feminine is this exquisite thing, and the two come together and just go oh my god, look at this beauty like how do we serve each other into our fullness? And what does that look like? Well, that looks like the masculine creating structures and systems and processes and architecture and blah, all the rest of the stuff that husbands life into its fullness so that the feminine gets to express itself as love in this world and relationship in this world. You know, we say the feminine is less than. But show me somebody that doesn’t desperately want to love doesn’t want to be in relationship. It doesn’t want to feel loved that doesn’t want to be able to open their heart and express love. That doesn’t want to be, doesn’t want to experience themselves through generosity because they’re full enough and connected enough to know what it feels like just to love and to give like, we’re all longing for it. And we all can’t bear ourselves in our small mindedness and our selfishness and our contraction and our judgment, and it’s just like, but that’s just a symptom of an empty system. It’s a symptom of emptiness. If there was fullness there, then the world would look different. Well, why isn’t there fullness, because fullness comes in through connection. And connection comes in through the feminine principle, you have to be in intimacy with something in order to feel it, to connect to it, and then to receive from it. And if we were in humility enough, as a race, to be in humility, before the natural world, we have a boundless source of energy, natural energy, the energy of Gaia, cosmic energy. You know, there is no limit to the energy that is available to humanity, if we understand that we are part of something massive, rather than this small ball of self-importance, trying to dominate the crap out of everything. That that severs us from the life force of our cosmos.
Rick Archer: You know, sometimes I get criticized for talking too much during interviews, I think you’re the cure for it, I could just listen to you for hours. I don’t feel like saying anything.
Clare Dubois: I didn’t talk too much during interviews.
Rick Archer: Great. I love it. You’re so articulate. How do you feel? I mean, you know, I’ve heard you allude, in a number of interviews or other talks to the massive shift that’s taking place in the world, there’s some kind of transformation in collective consciousness that seems to be afoot. How do you feel that’s going? Do you feel that we’re just sort of at the very dawn of it, and that there will be, you know, a huge amount of transformation yet to undergo many, many, many years of it, perhaps? Until
Clare Dubois: we don’t have. Yes
Rick Archer: Pardon, What were you going to say?
Clare Dubois: Yes. We don’t have many years
Rick Archer: No, we don’t. So do you think that that is that dooms us? Or do you think that it’s going to proceed, it has to proceed at a pace that would, you know, accomplish what needs to be accomplished in time for us to survive, and therefore, things are going to get really intense, because as you know, in terms of the environment, we’ve been dragging our feet for decades now, it was way back in the 70s. Or perhaps even earlier, in some cases, that we were told that global climate change was going to be a thing. And we just kept kicking the can down the road, you know, and now it’s gotten to a point where, you know, all sorts of deadlines have passed, and tipping points are actually already kicking in or about to and, and so it’s gonna be a lot harder to make the necessary changes now than it would have had we’d been working on them steadily for a few decades.
Clare Dubois: Well, the honest answer to what you’ve just said, is, I haven’t got a clue.
Rick Archer: Right
Clare Dubois: Now, if we push, I haven’t got a clue to one side, I can try and sound like I know what I’m talking about. So Well, several things. This is this, this is going to be a very bitty answer. But I’m going to try and come at it from different angles,
Rick Archer: Okay.
Clare Dubois: I don’t know whether you’ve heard the story on one of my interviews of bumping into Barbara Marx Hubbard on an airplane.
Rick Archer: No, I didn’t hear that one.
Clare Dubois: Well,
Rick Archer: She’s been on BatGap by the way for people who want to look it up. Go ahead.
Clare Dubois: Barbara Marx Hubbard, yes, if you haven’t heard this woman go and hear this woman. she, she was she passed. But she was one of the most extraordinary transmissions of a different quality of consciousness. So I’ve just driven through Colorado for 10 hours, and I haven’t seen a tree that is that isn’t either dead or dying. And I am in pieces, completely in pieces, and I’m getting on a plane to go home. And I can’t hold myself together. So I’m bawling my eyes out sitting on the airplane on the aisle, head in my hands trying to hide because you don’t cry in public transport. And my world as I knew it was coming to an end. Like as far as I was concerned, I had just witnessed, it’s no different to like driving through a warzone and just seeing everybody dead or dying on the floor. To me, it was no different. And I had while I’d been driving through Colorado, I’d been on Facebook saying to people like sharing photographs of like, mountain side after mountain side of dead Aspen and dead this and dead that every species was dying. And what was coming back on Facebook was it’s the same in Montana. It’s the same here. It’s the same they’re like and what I realized on that journey was the entire rocky mountain forest is dying right now. Like right now. So if you have not experienced the rocky mountain forest, go – now – because it’s going to be gone pretty soon. And so then I was in this place of “Wow. Okay”. So The entire rainfall system of North America is changing right now. And not only is nobody paying any attention, but they’re just gonna carry on trying to take more and more water out of the ground because that makes more and more profit and to hell with the groundwater. In fact, why don’t we just frack it? Why don’t we just frack it and put carcinogens into it that will poisonous forever. And then whilst we’re doing that, and I was like, I’d gone down this rabbit hole, and I was in despair. So I’m sitting there, and I look up. And on the other side of the aisle is Barbara Marx, Hubbard literally sitting next to me, and she’s asleep. So I sat there just like, Oh, God, can’t, you can’t like wake up an 86-year-old and I was like, Barbara, wake up, wake up, wake up, please wake up, please wake up. And then as I’m crying this, this arm shoots across the aisle, and she grabs me and she was like, Claire, do you know what this is? This is like, Barbara, you’re awake. She was like, watch this. This is divine timing. And, and I said, Barbara, I can’t, I can’t handle it. I cry now. Like, I can’t handle it, I, I just can’t handle it, I can’t do my work, I can’t bear the loss. I can’t bear. I can’t bear it, it’s too much. I can’t keep going like, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to deal with this, like, I’ve just driven through death, and nobody’s even bothering to stop and look, everyone’s just driving through it as if it’s normal. And it was so symptomatic of, we’re just carrying on as if this is normal. And she looked at me and she said, Claire, you have to find your intimacy with the evolutionary impulse. And I got it. Like she I just got this pure Barbara transmission of stop taking it personally expand your consciousness to a level that can take in the whole thing and understand that something much bigger than us running the show. You have to find your intimacy with evolutionary impulse. And it was just like, Oh, God, thank God, okay, it doesn’t make it doesn’t make it any easier for me to see polar bears eating their babies, it doesn’t make it any easier for me to understand that these species are going extinct hundreds a day around the world. But I can sort of reverse myself back up into a bigger consciousness of which I am a tiny facet and just go at this point of time on my planet, which is one planet out of God knows how many, life is changing forever. That’s what’s happening here right now. And the so-called superior species, which is acting like it’s the most inferior species on the planet is doing the damage. And we now get the choice to wake up or not. Okay, so if we could have done it differently 30 years ago, presumably, we would have done if we had it. In our capacity to be electing non assholes. Presumably, we would
Rick Archer: say we should start a political party. They’re not an asshole party.
Clare Dubois: No, we’re, we’re not done with assholes. We’re not done with assholes. Now. That’s just a reality. You know, we’ve just done it in my country as well. Okay. So some part of us has not come topside, yet. It needs more gestures of egoic trumping. You know, it needs more, or we wouldn’t be calling it off, it’s needing more exposing of the ridiculousness that welfare any cost is needing more exposing of the insanity, of trashing our forests and our indigenous peoples, it’s needing more like we’re needing more, we’re not done. If we were done, it would be over. Therefore, there is a, there’s a much deeper process that’s happening, that is real, that where we are choosing this path for our awakening, if we could be doing it differently, we would be if it could be less severe, it would be it pisses me off, frankly, that I even hear David Attenborough saying, you know, when the tipping points tip, is, if we’ve got time for tipping points of tipped, they’ve all tipped if you’re an environmentalist, you know, we’re past 12 o’clock, we’re not even, you know, two minutes to 12 anymore, wherever the we’re over the hump there. Okay. So, when you look at the science, it’s over, when you listen to indigenous tribes from all over the world who met in 2017, in Hawaii, and they all discovered that they had the same timeline, they can all see to 2026 and not beyond. Okay, so we’ve got five years, maybe to turn this around before this irrevocable climate change, and none of it, nobody can see what’s on the other side of that, that took me about two years to come to terms with. And then when I came out the other side of that it was just like, okay, so what if I went through, I don’t know 1000 incarnations, preparing for this one, just so that I could be of use in the next five years, and who knows what that’s going to look like. Now, I had another friend whose 17-year-old son was wanting to commit suicide, because he didn’t see any point. Like I’ve got no future. There is no future On this planet for me, there’s going to be no work though I can’t actually have my life as I would want it. I don’t want to be here. And he went to his mom and said, I’m going to commit suicide, but I’m going to give you one shot. Tell me why, why I shouldn’t do this. Give me one reason not to kill myself. And she thought for a while, and then she said, she rang me after, so you won’t believe what came out of my mouth. And she said, women are going to learn how to do magic. And she said, The most surprising thing was he stopped, and he looked at me and then he went, Oh, okay. Alright. And he stayed. Now, when I first met the Dalai Lama’s Tonka Pater, and I heard him tell the Tibetan myth when 1000 goddesses gather the Divine Feminine will rebirth through their combined energies, and the frequency of the planet will shift from one fear to one of love. When I first heard that myth, it landed in my head as when sufficient women can move beyond their egos, bring their multiple energies together, bow in sufficient humility for the Divine Feminine to actually move through their combined energies, a different frequency will come onto this planet. That was when three sisters made sense to me. That was when I thought, oh, okay, there is something particularly unique that women carry that is needed now, not because we’re better than men. But because there is something that has been lost through the suppression of the feminine in women. That means that there is an energy that is not on this planet. Well, if that energy were on this planet, patriarchy couldn’t exist. If that energy was on this planet, then we would be in relationship with nature, not beating the crap out of it. Therefore, there is worthiness to trying to help women remember who and what we are. Now, I know, people, you know, tribes, people in Colombia, the Kogi who have gone to Fukushima, and they’ve done ceremony and they’ve reduced radiation. I know there are weather workers on this planet who can call the rain, who can put crystals in the ground and call up water. You know, there are beings on this planet who know how to be in relationship with this planet. We only know the science, as it is panning out ahead of us in relationship to ourselves as a disconnected species that doesn’t know how to be in relationship with nature. When I have had those moments in my life, when I’ve properly merged with a natural world, and my consciousness has expanded, and I can’t you know, it’s happened, usually through trauma or some kind or another when I’ve just opened up and suddenly all of it’s coming through me, I have no insecurity. I have no neuroticism. I have no desire to do anything to anybody. I just am in a place of pure service, and I can access levels of energy that I didn’t know were even available to me. Maybe it’s going to take levels of disaster, levels of helplessness, levels of humility levels of shame, because we know we should have been doing this a hell of a lot sooner. Levels of threat. Okay, the financial system goes down. I’ve been in California for the last year we lost our power god knows how many times we had no power, no water, no internet, no, nothing. That was humbling. There, I was going, I can’t function like this. Okay, I, you know, I’m living like a human being that says all of this power and convenience is my birthright. It’s not, because all of it is at the expense of our planet. You know, we are in a crucible of circumstances designed to shake the convenience-oriented consciousness that that means that we take everything for granted. It’s going to be shaken to its roots. Is that the exact scenario that we need in order to free ourselves from a particular shape of consciousness that allows for an evolutionary bounce? Is that what it’s going to take? All I know, is that that’s what we’ve created. This is where we are. I don’t believe it’s coincidental that we incarnate therefore, I do think every single one of us has got something absolutely fundamentally unique to us, it to ourselves that we are here to bring. I think that our togetherness is fundamental in the elevating of consciousness that allows for our uniqueness to find its voice. Bottom line, we have no idea what we’re capable of. We have no idea what we’re capable of. But I think we’re having all of our convenience yanked away from us our safety, our numb, oh, yes, life is going to carry on as normal. It’s not going to we’re going to have to grow and it’s going to make something else available to us. Is it happening fast enough? To me? No, it isn’t. No, but this is where we are. So what are you going to do about it? Well, if you’re me, you’re going I stand on every, you know, street corner and bang a drum as loud as I can. Because I have to know that I’m doing something that’s not going to be everybody’s path. But you know, what I do want to do is like, get everybody by the shoulders and shake them hard. And just say, if you’re still doing denial, if you’re still thinking, somebody else is going to save you, if you’re doing a spiritual practice, but doing nothing for the environment? Wake up, wake up, because you actually you’re going to miss the biggest party ever, you’re going to miss the transformation of yourself into a relationship of belonging with this planet that will rock your world. Wouldn’t you rather experience that for four years before you are wiped out by a tsunami or a drought or a fire or whatever, they never experienced that at all? Like, what’s it all been for? If we’re not going to give it everything that we’ve got to turn the corner?
Rick Archer: I’ll base my next question on what Barbara Marx Hubbard said to you about getting in touch with your evolutionary impulse. And also relate that to what you were saying about how the forest communicates inter-communicates, you know, through the roots and the mycelia. I, in every interview I and in between, I mentioned the fact that to me, it seems that the universe, you know, both near and far is so utterly pervaded by intelligence orchestrating everything. And I think we could argue that the mess the world is in is a reflection of the degree to which we as like, teenagers with freewill have deviated from that intelligence have gotten out of tune with it. And what Barbara said, you know, get in touch with your evolutionary impulse is, I think, was not only the remedy for what you were going through at that moment, but I think is really the remedy for every human being and for the planet. Because if we were really in tune with the intelligence of nature, we could call it, then we would be we would be instruments of what we could call the agenda, if we wish of nature, which is, you know, unfettered evolution, growth, creativity, flourishing, and so on. So that’s enough, once you can springboard off of that.
Clare Dubois: Well, I don’t know why it took me to the place where I was remembering the exact path in England that I was walking down, when I realized that the fish in the river that I was walking next to had absolutely no choice about the environment that they were living in. Because we could just do whatever the hell, we wanted to do to it. And I remember being so shocked, so shocked, bawling my eyes out, of course, because that’s just what I feel when I have these moments. But suddenly realizing, Oh, my God, that horse has got no choice where it’s stuck, that cow has got no choice those birds, those birds, when all their insects disappear, which they are, they’ve got no choice, they’re just going to die. They’re totally helpless. And what I was crying about at the time wasn’t just the fact that I just thought it was desperately unfair. It was the fact that it had taken me until I was in my early 30s, to wake up to that fact, the fact that I had been so completely divorced, you know, I remember walking up a hill, in the Lake District with my mother, when I was 11 years old, and just saying to her, Do you realize there are still people living in the forests? Can you imagine how backward they are? You know, and then saying to her, you know, they haven’t understood about industrial agriculture yet. And they don’t know about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was in a British boarding school that was teaching me geography, the way that we were taught geography and that geography was nothing to do with sacredness. You weren’t taught sacredness, the indigenous people say, you know, why have you made everything sacred belong to one building, and everything else is there to be plundered? I was just like, those moments like, oh my god, you know, that church is the planet, our church, the sacredness is in there, and not one person over there can tell you whether you’re good or bad or depending on what you know what religion you’ve got. But we, we have are not taught about the sacred. I was a very good student, as a child. I love geography. I took it hook, line and sinker. It never occurred to me there was anything sacred about nature, I loved it. But if I was taught if I was taught that industrial agriculture was the really sensible evolved way of farming, then I believed it. And if I was taught that, the best thing to do would be to get the indigenous people out of the forest and educate them just like Bolsonaro was wanting to do now. I believed it. And it took me until I was walking down that path and I was looking at the river and I realized those fish were helpless, to our whims to our soap and our hormones and our poison and whatever else we are the plastic that is everywhere now. And it was like, Oh my God, what do I do with this knowledge suddenly, when you, when you, when you have an awakening when you when you see the insanity of the system, and yet the system is so much bigger than you and it’s plowing over you, what are you going to do? You know, then it’s like, well, why did my choices even matter? There’s one of me in this in this in a space of, you know, millions who are still chewing down plastic every day, and still heating their houses and having the windows open and, you know, whatever else. And then that’s when it becomes personal. You know, I live with a man who tried to give his life for a river to stop it being damned, chained himself to the bottom of the canyon – Mark Dubois.
Clare Dubois: And, you know, he had got to the stage where he loved nature enough to risk giving his life now, he lost that river. And the loss of it carved him out so profoundly that he now cannot waste a single thing. The loss of what he loved, made every single thing sacred, everything sacred, and not a conceptual sacredness, and actual felt lived sacredness, like if I buy some food, and it’s gonna go to waste, he physically hurts. And I and I get to rub up against him every single day of my life, I get to, I get to be with somebody, it’s one of the reasons why I chose to marry him. You know, I get to be with somebody who lives with all life as sacred. And I look at him and I just think, yeDah, he’s, he’s a complete one off, how do we get the rest of humanity to where he is? Well, he exists, and what he lives is a truth. And that truth exists inside every single one of us. Because even if you’re a drug addict, Nightmare, child molesting bully in that corner, the soul that you are is as sacred as Mark Dubois. It’s just that one has gone through one set of experiences that has arisen as that and one has gone through another set of experiences that has a resonance, that both have the capacity to fall into the truth of their sacredness, and both have the capacity to fall into the truth of all things as sacred and move back into dynamic relationship. And there’s something about the level of suffering that’s happening on this planet, there’s something about the having it in our faces that we are losing, so much like everything that we’ve taken for granted, okay, now it’s going there’s something about that, which to me is starting to go deeper and deeper and deeper and ring a different note. Like it’s, it’s touching a deeper place where the actual truth of who we are as part of nature is starting to be stimulated now. En masse, I have no idea whether six months of a huge crisis, whether Coronavirus is part of it, whether, you know, I have no idea what the furniture is going to be that it’s going to be arranged in a particular way to facilitate a quantum leap of consciousness. What I know is that it’s latent. Because we’re not living the truth, we’re living a constructed life that is patriarchy. Therefore, there is a completely other truth that is possible, there is a different quality of relationship that is possible, there is a different spirituality that is possible. There’s a different experience of union with our own souls with each other, and with nature, that is possible. Could that happen in six months? My brain doesn’t think so. My body knows that I have no damn clue and that something bigger than me does. And that my job is to log on to that evolutionary impulse to stop taking everything personally, to make myself available to a frequency that can activate whatever is latent inside me that is needed for now and then get out of the way and let whatever wants to come through come through. And that is what that is my prayer for everybody. To me. That’s all we can do. Now. Our job now is to get out of the way is to recognize our insecurities and our stories as Okay, that’s just clutter, we don’t need them anymore. We’re past the point of needing to continue to perpetuate this power over victim perpetrator rescue, crap that we’ve been doing forever and elevate to a level where our consciousness is in union with all that is and we can start to bring through the solutions that can actually make our way.
Rick Archer: Yes, and of course get out of the way doesn’t mean stand on the sidelines and watch the parade. It means get our get our egos out of the way so that we can be a better instrument of this divine intelligence or whatever we want to call it. You know, we’re going to be very much engaged But without mucking it up through our interference.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, and knowing that we don’t have the overview, we’re not supposed to have the overview. So the step that we’re taking now, we, you know, the evolutionary impulse or the overarching intelligence or God or whatever you want to call it, like that no spirit knows, we don’t have to, our job is to show up for the next thing. And then the next thing and then the next thing and not need the whole game plan laid out in front of us squeaky clean. To take the next step, We’re supposed to be blind, we’re supposed to be blind, that’s part of the journey.
Rick Archer: I think it was one of the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies were Harrison Ford had to walk across this chasm, and there was no bridge. But as he stepped, you know, steps would appear at each end each point where he needed to go, so it took us sort of a leap of faith with each step. And there was actually another line from the first one of those movies, where Karen Allen, I think, was the actress. She said, she said, Well, they’re in the middle of this incredible thing. And they’re in pits of snakes and all kinds of wild stuff going on. And she says, Well, what’s the plan? He said, I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along.
Clare Dubois: Well, that’s tree sisters. That’s tree sisters. I started three sisters, from a pit of depression with no experience, no resources. Nothing literally with just this feeling of everything else I tried to do failed. I was trying so hard not to do it. I was frightened on every level, there was not one place that I felt I was qualified. And it wouldn’t leave me alone. And in the end, it was just like, Okay, what are you going to do? Are you going to spend the rest of your life saying I didn’t even bother to try because I was too afraid? Or are you going to say I’ll give it a shot? I’ll learn something now. The car crash?
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah, the car crash.
Clare Dubois: The genius of the car crash was I was just on my way to a communications meeting in London, to hand over my concept of reforestation revolution. And I’d spent three years in Southern India on and off like, deeply studying this agroforestry initiative and figuring out how they were mobilizing, doing mass mobilization of a caste culture. And I was gonna, I was gonna give this idea to this communications team. And instead, I swerved on ice, I was heading for an edge. And a tree stopped me from going over an edge, which is one of life’s genius moments of “reforestation could stop humanity going over an edge”. But what happened was I hit the tree. And there was a blinding flash of white light inside the car. And there were two words, “the experiment” inside the car literally hanging over my dashboard. And I sat looking at these words, just going, you know, what the hell. And a male voice starts talking to me literally as if he’s in the car, like this wasn’t a clairaudient. Anything. This was just like, there was a voice in the car. And it said, “humanity is running out of time. But it’s not over yet. It’s going to take all of us rising to the challenge to get through what’s coming. The single greatest threat facing humanity is fear of failure. But you can get over fear of failure by calling everything you do an experiment, because you can’t fail an experiment you, can only learn”. After that came, watch the experiment, you have to reforest the tropics within 10 years. And after that came, you have to mobilize the women, you have to make it as normal to give back to nature as it is to take nature for granted. You got to reinstate the feminine principle, blah, blah, like the whole operating instructions of traces were given to me in the next half hour after that. But that one thing, call everything you do an experiment because you can’t fail an experiment you can only learn the fact that they gave me that before they gave me the job. Was the reason treatises even exist, because I have been on my hands and knees so many times just going “oh I can’t do it.” Yeah. A – just a disaster like I am careening from one learning experience to another, it’s a polite way of saying complete catastrophe. With my team going, you just, you know, you’re just learning. It’s an experiment, let it go. And getting up and going. Yeah, you know what? I think my greatest gift these days is that I have turned falling down and getting back up again into an art form. You know, do I have the skills to run a global organization? No, but I’ve done it anyway. You know, and when you grow something, I had to learn accounting, I had to learn the compliance. I had to learn how to run a team I had to learn fundraising had to learn social flipping media had to get onto my devices, which I hated, I had to learn how to have a board, how to run meetings, how to like, none of them are my skills. I couldn’t do any of them. But I’ve had to go through them to learn. And what that’s done is it’s, it’s shown me painstakingly, that every limitation I thought I had is a lie. Every single one is a lie; you can learn pretty much anything. And as you go through, even if what you learn is I am fundamentally crap at this, then you learn how to find somebody else that isn’t, but you don’t give up on your dream. Because if life has given you a dream, and life knows you way better than you know yourself, then inside that dream is a path to self-realization that is so much more than your spiritual teacher, because it is intimately and intricately created specifically, to pull you through all the limitations that are in the way of you and yourself. And there’s no excuse. And that’s the age that we’re living in. There is no excuse. The Gauntlet is thrown down our lives and the future of all our children are at stake, the entire fabric of our planet is on the line right now, there is no more excuse to not look at yourself, to feel into what your gifts are. And to figure out how to bring them. And no, it’s not supposed to be comfortable. None of this is supposed to be comfortable growing isn’t, you know, we like everything to stay the same. Nothing stays the same.
Rick Archer: How many trees have you guys planted so far?
Clare Dubois: We’re approaching 9 million.
Rick Archer: Okay. And this is not a cynical question. I’m going somewhere with this. How many trees die each day each week, each month each year?
Clare Dubois: We’re losing between 14 and 40 million a day a
Rick Archer: day. Okay. So what do you say to the person who says All right, it’s taken you, I don’t know how many years now to get almost 9 million planted? And we’re losing like four times that every day?
Clare Dubois: I would say Yeah. Isn’t that shit?
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. And I would say, if the if spirit had chosen somebody that knew that had any of the skill sets that I didn’t have, could we be at 100 million, probably. But they chose me. And that means they chose me with all my frailties. And does that mean, 9 million trees doesn’t matter in the scale of things? No. 9 million trees matter. Because it’s not just me. There’s hundreds of other organizations that are also doing their absolute damnedest. They’re also working against the consciousness of our planet, which is consumer consciousness that says, I want to use all my money to take from the planet, I don’t want to use any to give back. And Tree Sisters is not just a tree planting organization. We’re a consciousness shift organization.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah,
Clare Dubois: that’s the bit where I actually am useful. You know, because I’m sitting there saying, the tree planting effort is a reflection of successful consciousness shift or culture change. There’s no point me sitting there saying everybody plant trees, everybody plant trees, and I do anyway. But essentially, then the not planting of trees is a symptom of a disconnected culture. Therefore, if I want tree planting, or any form of ecological restoration or protection to happen, you got to deal with the consciousness of the people that are running the show. And you got to deal with the consciousness of the consumers that are that are creating them, you know, feeding the market, in order to perpetuate all of this, you know, people. I – the computer that I’m sitting on right now, God knows where the minerals were mined from, but I’m on an Apple, Apple does not have good policies around where they’re, around their mining. We want the smart future, the majority …
Rick Archer: The manufacture, by the way.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I,
Rick Archer: you know, they have nets around the buildings over there in China so that the Apple employees don’t jump to their death, the net’s catch them because they get so frustrated with their jobs.
Clare Dubois: Yeah, well, so I’m colluding with that. I have I’ve unknowingly colluded with that because I was given this computer. I didn’t know anything about Apple at that point. I’ve subsequently known, and I’ve also subsequently educated myself on the reality that the majority of the richest mineral deposits needed for our green technology future, which of course doesn’t require any healthy weather on the planet is sitting underneath the last remaining intact forests on our planet. So people just want the new phone. They don’t want the death of our planet. But they don’t relate the death. They don’t relate to the death of our planet, and they do relate to their phone. So we’ve got a massive issue going on. Now. I’m not just trying to plant trees and I’m glad that we are I see the significant changes that are happening locally in the areas that we are and the social changes that are happening in the areas that we are. And I, and I love it. And it helps me sleep at night because I know I’m making a difference. I know I’m restoring something, and I, you know, I look at the I look at the age that we’re going into as the age of restoration. And that’s what my life is given to. My life is given to helping humanity choose, and then create the age of restoration whereby every single one of us is, is inside the act of restoration. But I’ve got a much wider like my reason for being is so much broader than that I want in whatever way I can with this life that I’ve got. And I think it’s a useful life because of where I come from. Because if somebody can be as badly abused as me and as mentally ill as me, and turn that on its head to become a being of service that is specifically looking to say there is no amount of pain that can’t be got over there is no amount of abuse that can’t be redeemed, there is no amount of trashing that can’t be not taken personally, there is no like, I am a I’m a trans…, I’m a different kind of a transmission because of where I come from, because of what I have resolved in my life because of what I know is possible. So I’m looking to have experiences like this. And thank you so much for having me on your on BatGap because that means that whoever listens to this, just maybe something that I transmit can turn a key in them can touch the part of them that knows that what I’m saying is true to some part of them in there that knows that how we’re living is out of whack. And just maybe after the call will start to make different choices. You know, so how many people have I touched in this world? I have no idea. No idea a lot. I’ve been doing this for almost a decade. You know, we’re in 200 odd countries. Do I know all the stories of what the women are doing in those countries? No. Do I know all the different places that people are planting trees? No. I haven’t got a clue what I know is it’s what my mum always used to say she used to say Claire outcome and relevant outcome irrelevant. Just inspire yourself along the way. It’s like yeah, if I can, if I can be doing the best that I can living the most honestly, authentically, rawly. Like when I interview people, I ring them up beforehand. I say what’s your absolute growth edge right now? And what’s my absolute growth edge and let’s like, let’s do the dance around the edgiest place that we possibly can so that it’s got the strongest possible chance of touching the edge in someone else like how can you how can you make sure every experience in your life is as, I don’t know, pregnant with possibility as it possibly can be? How edgy Can you make it how alive Can you make it so that you just grow, grow, grow, grow, like grab every second is like pricelessly sacred?
Rick Archer: I hope we’re at your edge. I heard you tell a story in one of your interviews about a hummingbird that was taking beaks full of water to help to put out a forest fire while all the other animals were running in the opposite direction. It was a sort of a metaphor for, you know, doing what you can in fact, that’s what the hummingbird said he’s the elephant asked him why he was doing that. He said, Because I can. And it may remind me of another story I wanted to tell you Irene told me I have told the story on BatGap before, but I think it’s been a while. I think this is from the Garuda Purana. But I’m not sure. So there was a seagull and Seagull laid its eggs on the shore. And at one point a big wave came and washed the eggs into the sea. So the seagulls you know, said “give me back my eggs”, and obviously the ocean didn’t respond. Then she said “okay, then I’m going to make you dry”. And she started taking beaks full of water and taking them out of the ocean and you know, taking them out of the ocean like that. And she did this day and night and then they their night and didn’t seem to be having much effect on the ocean. But the king of the birds – she came to the attention of the king of the birds, I guess was Garuda or something who is Vishnu’s mount and he had the power to suck up the whole ocean. So he said to the ocean, “okay, give back those eggs or you’re toast” and “boom” the eggs the eggs were returned. So, it I see you as something like that Seagull and others, like you’re doing things against impossible odds. You know, and I just outlined the math, how many trees are killed every day? How many you’ve managed to plant in almost 10 years. But that’s not as you said, you know, that’s not
Clare Dubois: the point.
Rick Archer: That’s not the point. And he went ahead and said the point is this under something more fundamental than that, a shift in consciousness.
Clare Dubois: The point is just having a go
Rick Archer: having a go but then the point of the story is that if you really have a go and give it your all, then something much larger begins to take it seriously and come to join in, in the endeavor and that can you know, and then huge sweeping changes can occur.
Clare Dubois: I mean, what do you want to do? Like I mean, I am written to by mothers frequently saying, What do I tell my children? about climate change? My kids are terrified about climate change, what do I tell them? I have no answer for them. Because I’m like, Well, what are you doing? What are what are you doing? Like? Are you sitting there waiting for me to rescue you? You’re sitting there waiting for David Attenborough to rescue you. You’re sitting there waiting, waiting for Apple to rescue you. It’s like, I didn’t say that. But you know what I mean? It’s like, what do you want to tell your children? Do you want to tell your children that you’re really sorry? But you’re not gonna do anything? Or are you gonna say, “Okay, I’m gonna give it all I’ve got, I’m going to figure out some way of making a difference that shows to you that you matter more than my belief that I have nothing to contribute”. You know, to me, we, we are standing at this most fundamental moment. Okay, so here’s the thing. So a Christmas, not last year, but the year before that, I had a dream, I had a dream. And in it, there was a stage, and the roots of trees were coming across the stage. And then the stage filled up with trees. And then this tree is poured off the stage, and the whole auditorium filled up with trees. And I woke up to the words, “and so it begins”. And I remember sitting up in bed, and just going, What do you mean? And so it begins, I’ve been at this for like, eight flipping years. What do you mean, and now and so it begins? And, but I was in a very dissociate, I was like a, like a seismic state. Part of me, was absolutely in a new, had, like, was in a new timeline, or was in a new, something like a like something that happened in the dream, and I’d shifted, and the other part of me was sitting in the life as it was just going, don’t understand what’s just happened. And then I read on Facebook, one of our tree sisters said, Well, why can’t 2019 be The year of the tree. And I thought, Well, that’s exactly what the trees of disaster for the trees just said. And now it’s time for trees to be center stage. And so at the time we did try to make 2020 year of the tree, but then I got sick, and various other things happened, and it’s now 2021 year of the tree. But what was fascinating to me was those words, “and so it begins”. Now, that was a year short of a decade since the tree – since the car crash. What happened to me during that decade, Now, apart from almost 9 million trees, what happened was the mother of initiations and that initiation process through the birthing of tree services and bringing it to the world, basically said to me, there’s no fear in you that can’t be conquered. There’s nothing that you think you can’t do that you can either discover that you can do, or somebody else can do it. It seriously doesn’t matter whether people think you’re a prize asshole, or whether you’ve got something good to bring to the world because like, who gives? Essentially, you’re free now, what are you going to do with your life? And I sort of stopped and I looked at myself and went, Wow, I’m ready. Like, now I am officially ready, like I have been mashed a million ways from, you know, there’s no part of me now that’s invested in anything other than the future for which I actually am living. And I’m a stand for, I’m probably genuinely useful now. And then all these coincidences started happening around me, which also suggested, and so it begins. And it was just like, Well, okay, well, what if now it is, what if the car crash was saying, you’ve got 10 years to reforest the tropics? What if those 10 years started at the end of 2019? What if, you know, I’d been looking at looking at myself as a consummate failure because I’d only been able to plant however many millions of trees, I thought it would be so much easier than that. When everybody realized that trees were carbon made visible, but no, we like shopping. And, but what if, okay, well then doesn’t even matter if it’s true. I now get to live into the reality of okay, we make 2021 year of the tree that coincides with the UN ecosystem of decade of ecosystem restoration. Then we lay a game plan out for 10 years and we give it our all, okay, that’s a fun game. I wonder how many people will play it with me. You know, how many other organizations will jump onto this bandwagon? How many other people want to pour their creativity into this? And suddenly, it becomes this whole open book that is waiting for you to write on it. It’s waiting, like the book of human history is waiting for you to write on it. With the gifts, and the tears, and the love and the longing and the prayers, and the practice and the service, and the humility, and the outrageous creativity that exists inside of all of us, like that book for me, fully opened and lay itself on its back a year ago. And now like, I don’t care, frankly, if we’ve only got until 2026, I’m not in the story of how long we’ve got to go, I’m in the story of what is actually possible. If we put ourselves fully into the game, that’s it, like, live every moment, as if it’s a miracle that has been given to you to discover what is possible right now, every relationship, what it does is it pulls you over your comfort zones, and then it magnetically attract to you the people and the circumstances are also living on that edge. So then it becomes this exponential experience of growing and growing and discovering and exploring and more possibility. And it’s like that is a way to live that’s available to us now, in a way that it’s never been available to us because the odds are so great. And the awakening is so, so steep, and so rich, because there’s so much loss going on. And so the love that is becoming available because the grief is finally strong enough to blast through our apathy. Like this particular cocktail is so, God, is so rich. It’s everything to me now. Like it’s okay, the trees are dying, okay, the whales are dying, okay, the hummingbirds are dying. Okay, the bees have gone, okay. Okay, this is where I am. How am I going to let that grief, like alchemize me into something that can listen to life in a different way and see what more of a difference that I can make.
Rick Archer: Speaking of trees in Wales, I heard you say in one of your talks that the Sequoia and the and the whales are actually sort of in cahoots with one another and are …. I thought that was pretty cool. That this is a bit of an abrupt segue here, but you want to elaborate on that. And you also earlier in this interview, you said something about different trees are sort of conduits for energies from different planets. And I thought that sounds interesting. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those two points.
Clare Dubois: I can’t talk too much about the planets, because that was just one of those things that a wonderful tree Oracle said to me, do you realize that every species of tree is in relationship with a different planet, and I got as far as Wow. So that’s, that’s as much as I can give you on that one. There’s that. But what was interesting about the whales was my husband and I had this habit of managing to go to the redwoods. After dark, I didn’t mean to, but I always managed to time it really badly. And get there late, like Twilight or whatever. And what I discovered was that I could tell where the trees were because I could hear whale song. I could, I could hear the bulk of the trees as if I were swimming with whales. And he would test me, and he would he say, okay, like, close your eyes and point to a tree. And I would go There’s one over there. And there’s two over there. And I could pretty much go to them. And I would say it’s the weirdest thing. I am literally with whales like I am with whales. These trees are whales. And then I took it to when I was interviewing some of the Kogi who were the big brother, they consider themselves as in from the from the mountains in Colombia, this incredible, incredible tribe, whose you know, their shaman spend the first nine to 26 years of their lives in the dark in a cave, just learning how to commune with the mother with Gaia. They shared that. The biggest, the biggest, what would you call them? Alive masses on the planet are the conduits for the largest amount of cosmic energy. So the receivers the biggest receivers of what you would call cosmic energy coming into the planet are the biggest trees and the biggest beings, therefore you’re talking elephants, whales, trees, probably fungi actually, you know, the biggest the biggest actual living masses receive these great downloads and, in that respect, they said that the, you know, the whales of the Earth, which are the Giants Sequoias and the great Redwoods and the other trees that we’ve already got rid of. And the whales of the ocean who’ve – they’re still with us by the skin of their teeth are well – how would I say it? I mean, this is this is where I don’t have language because we don’t have the understanding of the level of intimacy that the beings around us have with the cosmos, that we can’t even arrange our mind to understand interdependence. The level of intimacy of interdependence between the species on our own planet, there are beings on our planet that are in that level of intimacy with off planet with other stars with other cosmos as with nebulous. And that’s their norm. And that includes many of the tribes, you know, the Kogi are one of them. The Kogi like this is just one aspect of their life like they’re custodians of this planet, but they’re in communication with multiple other dimensions. What I love about it is I I’m an intimacy junkie, like I just am an intimacy junkie because that was severed for me as a child, because that was one of the things that became impossible for me because my body was forced badly. And therefore I did not know how to open it or close it or have any relationship with feeling and I just, I just left my body in order to manage living in violence. And what that’s done is it’s meant there’s been this like steady reclaiming of intimacy, like what is intimacy, like what does it mean to be in relationship with and to feel the filaments of communion with a tree, actual communion, when you realize that tree is paying as much attention to you as you are to it, when your whole body flushes and your energy runs up your spine, because you can feel the fluid in that tree running up its spine, and your body starts answering because you’re intimate enough with it, when you can start to feel the branches of your own energy communing with sunlight, because you’re learning how to merge with that being. And when you realize that you can do that with a blade of grass, you can do that with a dewdrop, you can do that with the surface of the ocean or the depth of the ocean. You start I remember, when the sky fell into my chest, for the first time, I wandered around, like bawling my eyes out up and down on this beach, because like, I couldn’t look at the sky without this love pouring into me like, and I couldn’t manage it, I couldn’t control it, my heart was still too contracted to manage the scale of it. So I would kind of like, open a little bit bawl my eyes out while the pain was so intense, and then shut again, and then look at the sky again, and it would happen again. And I was like consciously opening and opening and opening because I don’t want to stay limited. You know, and I, I don’t know that I would ever be able to live in a level of intimacy where I can feel it all the time. But there are moments in my life where I’ve learned, oh my god, communion, actual communion, you don’t even have to have the concept what it is, there isn’t even a concept that it’s sacred. Because you’re inside, it’s you. It’s like, it’s the most exquisite level of longing. And to me, that’s what children should be being taught how to belong. How to how to merge with nature, you know, the taking meditation into schools were great, okay, now let’s take meditation out of schools, do it with the trees, like, let’s teach kids how to lie on the ground and merge with nature, how to feel it as part of themselves and themselves as part of it. Like, let’s, let’s, because, quite well, the so many forms of meditation, but the meditation that takes you into, like, merges you with consciousness, like the embodied meditations, that the body base, where you’re not just moving out of body awareness and into expansion this way, the actual limitless expansion through the physical is a whole other dimension of intimacy, which is belonging
Rick Archer: to both so as to integrate the two, you know, and yeah, to be in the world, but not of it kind of thing. Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. But also how about being in the world. And made of it.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Bringing its consciousness through you. And being in such a state of love that you can do no harm.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s beautiful. I can listen to you for hours. Well, I could, I want to make sure I have enough time to talk more, a little bit more about Tree Sisters, and I would invite anyone listening to send in any questions they may have. But there’s so many interesting cosmic implications to all the stuff you’re saying. It’s, it’s very deep and very profound, and, and just so timely, you know, given I kind of think, you know, as rough as the world has been throughout history, we’re sort of entering into an evolutionary rapids now, you know, we’ve been cruising down the Grand Canyon, it’s been pretty smooth. Now we hear the roar of the rapids and We’re starting to hit them. And, you know, I think there’s going to be, as you said, huge changes in the coming years there needs to be. And if we’re, if we’re not the charioteer holding the reins of this thing, then whoever is the charioteer has it under control and is going to increase the pace in order to, you know, my metaphor is getting a little stretch there. But go ahead. You’re, you’re gonna say something.
Clare Dubois: I want to talk about my husband. ‘
Rick Archer: Okay, great
Clare Dubois: So Mark has this just, it’s a really helpful metaphor. Really helpful. Excuse me. So when you’re whitewater rafting,
Rick Archer: well, good. Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Class One, totally flat. Class two might have some roughly been, yeah, last three, you’ve definitely got some rapids, they could be quite interesting. Class four, I’ve never been on a class four, I’m not very brave. Class five, you could die. You’re nuts Yeah. Class six, you’re dead. Alright. So unless you’re on the Grand Canyon, in which case, they have a whole other scale, but anyway, that’s the that’s classically how they rate rivers. Now, as Mark says, humanity is in a class five, we’re in a class five. Now, that’s, that’s all of us. We’re all in a class five. When you’re all in a class five. Everybody that’s in your boat needs to be awake, you can’t have anybody that’s not awake. Well, we’re all in this boat together. Now, when you’re in a class five, you have to be able to see way ahead and look for the through line. Because if you look for each individual obstacle, like there’s a hole, there’s a rock, there’s a shredder rock, if you look at the obstacles, you’ll go to them. And then you’ll get shredded, or then you’ll get drowned. Or then you’ll go down a whirlpool or whatever. If you can look through all the obstacles to your through line, that is the path through, then you will all be able to basically put your attention on the through line and get through the rapid that’s the way you get through a class five rapid, you get through with the through line. So he is always talking now about what is the through line, where’s the through line? You know, my through line is the age of restoration. My through line is there is a world up ahead where every single member of humanity is giving back to the trees, where every single one of us is not chewing up is not consuming in the way that we have been, there is no such thing as waste, there is nothing going into the ground that used to be nature that’s been poisoned. And then, you know, like, we just don’t do it. The age of restoration is a humanity that is consciously moving into reciprocity with the natural world as ourselves in order to perpetuate life for future generations. And that is where I’m going. That’s my through line. Trump who gives a crap he’s a shredder rock over here. You know, like, all the, there’s so many obstacles that I could get totally, you know, distracted by my own fear. How do I live in a bow cut, that’s another rock over here? It’s like, okay, these things you got to eat on the way through the river, you got to deal with these things. But we need to have a through line to get through a class five rapid, and you need to figure out what that through line is for you. Denial is not a through line. Denial is not a way you don’t let everybody else get on with it and sit in the back of the boat like this. With your headphones in thinking you’re going to stay in the boat, you’ll probably fall out. Like if you want to make it in any meaningful way. You need to create your True North. You need to figure out okay, where am I going? Who do I want to be? How do I want to get there? How do I want to be living? How do I want humanity to be living? What do I want my children to be facing? What do I want my grandchildren to be inheriting? There’s your through line. Okay, now, how are you going to show up in that boat? To get down that through line to the destination of your choice. And then how do you not let anything else take you off? Course? How do you basically say, you know, I don’t care what you think of me, I’m still going that way. I don’t care. It’s an inconvenience for you because you don’t want to look at your shit. I’m still going that way. You know, this is where we need to go. So I love I could do river analogies all day every day. They are brilliant.
Rick Archer: I’m really glad I brought it up. I mean that you did a great job with that. Again, I use this fumbling little example and you knocked it out of the park. And I give you another one because it’s brilliant, please, awesome. Yeah, do
Clare Dubois: so if you want to river and you get thrown out of your boat and you get sucked down into a like an underwater Eddy like what can happen is that you, they call them washing machines under the water where the water is going round and round and round and you can get stuck in one. And the classic thing that we all think to do is I need to get up to the surface. Let me get away from the pain as fast as possible. Let me get back to the light When you’re stuck in a washing machine, so when you’re in hell underwater and you can’t get out of it, what you do is you throw your arms up and you force yourself to go deeper. But you exit nightmare by going through the bottom of it. And the bottom of it will basically take you downstream, and it’ll push you up in a boil, and then you’ll come out, if you try and get up, you won’t get up, if you try and go down, you will come up. I love that analogy, because it basically says, you know, embrace the suffering when you’re in it. Go bottom it out, like, don’t try and get away from it. Trust that life is bringing you this particular circumstance because there’s a gift for you go down, go down and see how deeply you can be in trust that when you’re ready, life will bring you back up again. And it’ll do it for you. Your job is just to fully meet the situation where it is and not try and get away from it.
Rick Archer: That’s fantastic.
Clare Dubois: I love that analogy.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Kind of reminds me of you know, not swimming, swimming against the Riptide but going parallel to the shore and then being able to come in, but your analogy is better. Any more river analogies?
Clare Dubois: Not I’m sure I’ve got a whole bunch. But I think that’ll do for now.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Have you ever heard of the notion of phase transitions?
Clare Dubois: I’ve heard about. I don’t know what it is. It’s a simple thing. We actually see it every day. It’s like when water boils. That’s a phase transition from one state of water to another state of water. And the interesting thing about it in this context is that water can get like within one degree of boiling, and it appears like nothing much is happening. And then as soon as it reaches that extra little bit of heat, it turns into steam, you know it boils. So with regard to society, I think that that we can be much closer to the brink of a radical transition than we realized. And everything just kind of seems like Same old, same old. But we’re building up the temperature so to speak and getting closer and closer to a phase transition point where there could be an abrupt shift. Yeah. Argina – I’m sitting here in Argina’s office. And Argina was
Rick Archer: Argina, our dog who’s been
Clare Dubois: Yes. Who’s just brought out a book “Radical Brilliance”, which I recommend to everybody. It’s like it is so good. But he was coming out with this analogy the other day where he was saying, you know, do you want do you want overflowing lifeforce? And I was like, Oh, my God, I would so love overflowing lifeforce. And he was just like, well, what would it look like, you know, an overflowing life? And then you’re saying, Well, do you realize that right before overflowing is full and full, and look like absolute stillness, like absolute stillness, before the overflowing start? And that’s another of those phase transitions that you were talking about. But it was such a subtle one for me, which is like, okay, yeah, stillness can be like that absolute pregnancy, that potential before all hell lets loose before everything starts to move. And what we want is we want it on our own timing, we want it to look like something that makes sense to us. You want it to happen, so that we’re comfortable. We want these transitions to happen so that they’re comfortable, and they’re not. And actually, they need to not be comfortable, so that we’re shaken out of our normalcy, because our normalcy has been an addiction to a convenient culture that is profoundly inconvenient to nature and everything else, including ourselves. So there is a level of discomfort. So again, in the washing machine, it’s like, we need to let what is become uncomfortable. So like I say to women, if you’re not crying, you’re not paying attention, if you are crying, you’ll be evolving. If you are crying, your creativity will be linking your love into action. Like the feelings that are conjured that are elicited, by the circumstances that are asking us to pay attention will evolve us in a way that we can only dream of our job is to let is to let this have us is to let our circumstances have their way with us. And that means that’s why I say denial isn’t an option, you’re missing the greatest party, you’re missing your own evolution. If you don’t let the reason why you chose your incarnation right now, to have its way with you get into the washing machine, like let yourself be changed by our circumstances and discover who you are through the giving of yourself.
Rick Archer: What if people don’t know their purpose? What if they feel like life is sort of tedious and drab and you know, struggle and I don’t know what I don’t feel like I’m here for anything in particular. It’s like, I gotta earn money. I gotta raise the kids. And, you know, there’s no cosmic purpose to my life. How do you kind of wake that up in yourself or discover it?
Clare Dubois: Well, I mean, I think again, I’m not here to try to give anybody a purpose. And nor am I here to say, Oh, come on, you’re just being too slow. What I will say is, if you’re unhappy, if you’re dissatisfied, If you can be honest with the fact that your life isn’t working for you, then something’s missing. And if you were brought up to believe that your lot is your lot, then maybe you will stay in your lot, and you won’t move. If you were brought up to believe that, that’s all you’re worthy of. And you want to believe that, then you can keep believing it. And you can stay in that place. If you can let – I mean, I always say to people, follow your longings, if you can let yourself even register what your longings are. If you can let yourself feel that you’re dissatisfied, if you can let yourself feel that there’s an emptiness that you’re trying to fill with. God knows how much coffee or whatever it else is that you’re filling into the void. If you can stop acting in a way that manages the discomfort, and actually feel the discomfort in its fullness, inside of that discomfort will be a whole lot of truths that you don’t particularly want to own up to this relationship, my work, how I’m working with my children, or what I’m eating, or how I’m self-medicating or addiction to technology, or whatever it is that we’re doing to manage the like, Oh, my God, just like can’t handle any of it. If you’re satisfied, then fine. You know, you’re satisfied, fine. If there’s any part of you, that is saying to you, there’s more, and I’m dissatisfied, follow it. And what I have witnessed in my own life is if I can let myself grieve, if I can let myself fully own up to the absence of what is possible, or the absence of what I know to be true. So for instance, when I had the car crash, I had, like the whole download of the of tree sisters, I was shown a version of myself in the future, I was shown myself on stage wandering around, huge audiences, blah, blah. And I remember just thinking, I mean, I just sat there and just broke my heart. I fell into like an 11-month hideous depression. It was so confronting for me, it was I was, it was awful. Because I saw that version of Claire that they were showing me. And I knew that she was in here somewhere. I knew she was in here somewhere. And I was terrified of her. And I was terrified of not being her. And I was terrified of the process of becoming her. And I was terrified of what would happen to me if I became her. Like, there was nothing about it, that didn’t scare the crap out of me. And I was so ashamed. Because what I chose was to not be her. For 11 months, I squirreled around in my own shit, and tried to do anything but that everything failed until I basically said yes, and then it all started to happen. But I, I had to admit to myself, all the different areas that I was basically compromising myself shutting down on myself, not living my truth, blah, blah, blah. There’s a video out there that I did called “Waking Up”, which you may or may not have seen the ritual theater of my own awakening, it was the probably the single most important wake up experience of my life. My name back then was Clare Daikon. So if you look for Claire Daikon, and waking up, you’ll find this story, which was my biggest awakening. And it was where I absolutely met the depth of my insecurity, and my depth of love for this planet. And putting the two of those things together. Eventually, my love of the planet won, but it meant that there was no more room for the insecurity that had basically run my life. Now, everybody can only be as honest with themselves as they want to be. I can’t force anybody to be any more honest with themselves as they want to be. I’m not going to say it’s a fun process. But I am going to say it’s a process of self-liberation, a completely other process of self-liberation, that will show you what you’re made of. Do you want to know what you’re made of? Do you want to discover that there’s more in there? Do you want to live a life that will be so flipping meaningful? Do you want to know that you gave it your all? If you do, there may be some course corrections up ahead. And it doesn’t mean that you get: there is your final destination here is the path – is a path. It means start with one step and see what happens. And as my brother famously once said, To me, life can’t steer a stationary object, you actually have to get going. You have to just move and if you’re going in the wrong direction, your soul will find the creative components necessary to move you just start. Don’t sit and wait for it to be perfect. Don’t wait to be your perfect self before you have a go. There’s no such thing. We don’t have time.
Rick Archer: And it also doesn’t mean that you have to necessarily make a dramatic change in your life, like quit your job, leave your marriage, you know, you know, go off and do some, you know, completely upend everything. I mean, when I started this, I was working full time, self-employed, but full time. And over the years, we managed to shift the ratio gradually between that and this to the point where this is what we do now. And we needed to do that. I mean, we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to pay the mortgage or buy the food and stuff. So
Clare Dubois: I did it the other way I did the, like,
Rick Archer: You did the abrupt thing.
Clare Dubois: huge gestures. And I would say never do that.
Rick Archer: Yeah, no. Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Like, don’t you don’t need to hurt yourself in the process. But you do need to be honest with yourself to start a process.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, as we’ve been saying, several times during this interview, if you start, then the next step appears, and that there was a great book called “Collision with the Infinite” by Suzanne Siegel. And her mantra was do the next obvious thing.
Clare Dubois: That’s a great title.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. And it is, you know, my old teacher used to say, you know, and like my mother, it’s not, it’s not the destination. It’s the journey.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Clare Dubois: You know, and if you if you can commit to just being in the process, and being blind, like, it’s, to me now, I don’t need to know what’s up ahead. I just need to know that I’m putting myself 100% into what I’m doing now. And what’s around the corner will show up when I’m ready for it. I don’t have to try and manufacture a safe future. I want to manufacture a fully alive present.
Rick Archer: Perfect. So we probably should wrap up in a few minutes. So let’s talk more specifically about Tree Sisters. And here’s a question that will segue you right into that. This is from Paulo in Santa Cruz, California, who asks, Do you believe that money is inherently bad?
Clare Dubois: No.
Rick Archer: It’s a setup for you
Clare Dubois: no, but I think it’s being used in appalling ways. I think money can be used in an extraordinary way money can be used in extraordinary ways we use money in a beautiful way.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Clare Dubois: I think our economy is fundamentally flawed. That’s different too as money, bad. Money is just an energy. It’s just a thing. I think greed is terrifying, in terms of what it actually perpetuates in our world. But greed is just one face of disconnection and lack. It’s like there’s a roaring great hole that people are having to fill with money, and power as the pseudo power because we’ve decided to make money God on our planet. Money is not God. Life is God as in my world, the perpetuation of life, you know, you can’t have healthy ecology on a planet where the economy exists at the expense of nature. We are living in an insane system, therefore at
Rick Archer: the expense of the vast majority of the people.
Clare Dubois: Well, exactly. But it’s the same thing in nature. So if we have an economy that’s at the expense of life, if we’re just going to measure the GDP, and not look at the effect on ecosystem services, which is the genius that nature creates for us, we’re stupid, frankly. And we are just gonna head off down a hellhole, which is where we’re going. So transformation of the economy, what they do with money, I don’t know. But how we’re using it right now, isn’t it?
Rick Archer: Yeah. I often say in my life, and also in these interviews, there are so many structures in this world, economic, political, you know, environmental, all these policies and structures and governments and everything else that really have couldn’t exist, they would be so inappropriate or out of place in a really enlightened world, or what’s that term? You use a system versus a restorative society or something?
Clare Dubois: Yeah, restorer species,
Rick Archer: Yeah, that, but it’s it. But I then I think, well, how are we going to get from here to there because these things seem so powerful and so entrenched. But look what happened. I mean, the Berlin Wall fell overnight, unexpectedly, the Soviet Union collapsed unexpectedly. I think, radical changes can take place quite abruptly, and you don’t see them coming.
Clare Dubois: Look at Greta.
Rick Archer: Yeah, absolutely. She’s
Clare Dubois: A girl with a sign on her own outside of
Rick Archer: sitting there all by herself. And then she’s Time’s person of the year or the next year.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. And she’s like, she’s like a global conscience, you know, a conscience. Yeah, absolutely. What if how many adults would sit outside a bloody thing with one sign on their own? You know, it’s taking the bravery of children. I mean, we just don’t know. We just don’t know what’s possible. And that’s where I hold where I stand women. You know, we all need to figure out how to learn how to make magic. We all need to move into our magical selves. We all need to learn how to activate more of ourselves, that world who knows where it is, but if that’s The only world that you’re prepared to live in, then you’re calling it into this reality. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Rick Archer: Okay, so here’s a question that’ll segue you into telling us a little bit more about three sisters. This is from Maria in Philadelphia, who asks, I was curious to know where all the trees are going. Is this figured out ahead of time? Or can group cities, parks, and such get on a list to accept trees? Are there certain types of trees that you only use? Thanks, Clare, for all your passion when it’s easy to lose hope.
Clare Dubois: It’s a pleasure. Right? So first of all, everyone needs trees. You know, right now we were even in communication with a shaman who is wanting to plant trees in Greenland. Because the perma – because the ice is going the permafrost is belching out. Me. And yeah, I mean trees everywhere. Having said that, I’m not going to contradict myself, there are some places that you should not plant trees, but in anywhere that was once forest, we need trees. England is down to 12% tree cover, it should be 33% minimum, you know, so, Tree Sisters itself -. So when I had the car crash, you have to reforest the tropics within 10 years. The tropical forest belt is the crucial cooling mechanism that Gaia used, she created the forest at that part of her body, because she uses the intense heat to circulate water to create the rainfall. And the contrast between like the polar ice and the hot bound around her waist, that contrast, creates the circulatory system that generates all the weather. So when we if we lose the ice, and we lose the tropical rainforest, which we’re doing both at the moment, then we’re going into a planet that’s in over its uncontrollable heating. So that’s where we’re going right now. So our focus is tropical forest. We’re planting in Amazonia. In Brazil, the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, we’re planting in Kenya, Cameroon, Mozambique, India, Nepal, Madagascar, and West Papua is all different forest belts, they’re all different kinds of trees. They’re all native indigenous to the places that they are. They’re all being planted by the local communities. We’ve got very strong social parameters with our reforestation strategy, which basically mean, if it’s not working to the advantage of the community, it doesn’t happen. Our tree price which amazingly, is 50 cents per tree, and it’s 50 cents per tree, because we’re planting in some of the poorest places on earth. That includes all the costs, volunteer costs are paid tree sisters every single month, so that we can plant fast-growing tropical trees, why tropical trees, they sequester between three and 12 times as much carbon per year as a temperate tree. So when you’re in a carbon emergency, you want to put your money, where you get the most bang for your buck and the most carbon for your buck. So you plant trees in America or England or whatever, it’s between five and 25 pounds to plant a tree, we can plant hundreds and hundreds of trees for that same amount of money and, and sequester a hell of a lot more carbon Does that answer the question?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think it did. And you know, talking to you, almost every single sentence you say contains little nuggets that I could, you know, we could expand into a whole discussion. And
Clare Dubois: I’ll just say, after that, like, so what so we are looking were trying to now or not try. we’re embedding trees into ticket prices for concerts for festivals into products. They were basically saying wherever money changes hands, we want to insert a tree in there. So we’re starting treehouses, where hotels are planting trees for every night somebody stays there, they’re putting it in restaurants or putting it into meals or wine or whatever, because an extra an extra 50 cents. When there’s enough people around the world just putting an extra 50 cents an extra 50 cents, it stacks up to forest. So you go to the <treesisters.org> website and look for partner with us. You’ll find all sorts of different ways to get your business involved, to get your family involved to get your small business involved. Whatever, like there are ways but essentially, you generate the funds. You give it to us. We send it to the tropics we report back.
Rick Archer: Great. Okay, everybody do that. Oh, well. Thank you, Claire. This has really been one of my most enjoyable interviews. I’ve just loved every moment of it. And the whole week has been great listening to your various talks and your enthusiasm is inspiring. Your wisdom is deep and I really do feel like you’re some kind of a force of nature.
Clare Dubois: Well, I’ve let nature take over.
Rick Archer: Yeah, obviously.
Clare Dubois: So that’s what this is. I’m no longer like; I I’m invested in becoming whatever a human becomes when you let nature take over because that’s what I think we’re all supposed to be. We’re not here to be tidy and acceptable and appropriate. We’re here to discover what the hell nature actually is as it expresses, through a human being, and I want to be the wild river. Yeah, I want to be the flower that isn’t ashamed to open and the tree that dumps, you know, becomes completely stark naked when it feels like it like, you know, Nature doesn’t hold back, we’re not supposed to hold back like what, what is a world of human beings that are roaring celebrations of life. That’s the, you know, physical life, real life that protects and nurtures everybody that looks for the best, and everybody and calls it out. That’s the world I want. I want a world that makes sense to my heart, I want to invite everybody to help create it with me,
Rick Archer: imagine that I sometimes use the rain forests as sort of an example of what might happen to all the individuals in the world if the ground of being or sufficiently lively, you know, because in in a verdant forest or jungle, the ground is very nutritious, and there’s plenty of rain, and you have this explosion of life, you know, and so much color and noise and, you know, just a variety and so on. And I kind of think that humanity would look like that, if we had, you know, if presence or being or pure consciousness or whatever you want to call it, were much more lively and connected to every individual.
Clare Dubois: Yes. And only satisfied with systems and processes that strengthen life. If it doesn’t strengthen life, don’t do it. Don’t invest in it. Don’t, don’t condone it,
Rick Archer: don’t swallow it.
Clare Dubois: Don’t swallow it. No, like, wake up to every action. Like, if you’re satisfied to live in a dying world, continue but own up to yourself that you’re living in a dying world and you’re contributing to killing it. If you want to live in a thriving world, if you want to experience what it’s like to watch restoration happen all around you, if you want the species back. If you want bees back, if you want life to make sense, then stand for it. Become it, embody it, call it back in and discover what that feels like. Because it is amazing. It is amazing. But first of all, you got to you got to let yourself realize that we’re losing it and grieve, and then get off your ass, do something and do something that makes sense of who you are. That’s the thing. Make sense of your actual gifts. So that the bringing of your gifts brings you even closer to who you are not about do the thing you think you ought to do. It’s do what you’re made for. You know, I appear to be made for this. Who knew? I didn’t know.
Rick Archer: Ah, good point. I mean, we’re not saying everybody should do exactly what Claire is doing. We’re saying Do what you’re designed to do.
Clare Dubois: Yeah. Which means own up to the longings in your heart that are pointing to what is unlived. And then see if you can bear to live the rest of your life without it. And if you can’t grieve it, and then start to bring it forward.
Rick Archer: Great, well, I better not say another word because that’s such a perfect ending point. So I just want to thank you. And thanks, thank those who have been listening or watching and go to batgap.com to see what you can what you’ll see there all the various things that I mentioned in every interview, and go to treesisters.org to learn more about what Claire is doing sign up for her newsletter donate if you wish to do so. There’s some also some great videos that have been made, which I guess you probably have on there, which are also on YouTube, which is really nicely done videos, three, four minutes that kind of explain what you’re doing in a very visual way.
Clare Dubois: Well, they show the trees, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna invite every single one of you if you’re listening to this, if you happen to be somebody that uses electricity or are contributing to the warming of our planet, if you would like to consciously start cooling down, we can help you, you know, we can help you like give as much as you can. And we will turn it into fast growing tropical trees. And then you will know while you’re trying to figure out how to change your life into something that makes sense that you are already contributing to the cool line, not just the warming of our world. That’s a bottom line that every single one of us needs to do to clean up the mess that we’re making. That’s what we’re for. We will do that just hurl money to us every month. That’s become a restorer. Like if you’re giving $20 a month for planting almost over 600 trees for you or something a year. You know, we can grow you a forest and when you become a donor every month you donate, you can go into your account and you’ll see how big my forest now and then other people donate to your thing or you’d start a fundraiser, you can see how big is my forest now. You build some momentum, it matters. The trees start to get under your skin. And you start to want to find use. You want everybody to start doing this and then you’re part of the momentum that is pointed towards the age of restoration. And that’s where we need everybody create the world we want to see don’t suffer the world that we don’t.
Rick Archer: Great. Thank you, Claire.
Clare Dubois: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on here and asking all the hard questions.
Rick Archer: They weren’t that hard you. You hit him out of the park, everyone.
Clare Dubois: Bless you. Thank you so much. Thank you