Hey Christa, my name is Vanessa, I'm calling from Melbourne, Australia. I'm curious to hear your thoughts given the current situation, the world finds itself in, how we can find connection in, in disconnection.

I think we all have a duty for the album, while being of our world and the people that live in it, to disconnect, but in a time where connection has never been so important, how do we, how do we balance the two, how do we disconnect physically while remaining emotionally, socially connected to others?

Oh, it's such an interesting question because, so thank you Vanessa, it's such an interesting question in one way because I feel like what's coming to mind for me in my own experience of what you're describing,

has evolved a lot in these weeks of lockdown, quarantine, forced disconnection, physical disconnection, as you say.

And yeah, I mean, I, I will try to see if I have anything, anything really practical to add in terms of advice, but really what the question, what makes me want to do is reflect on this week, on some of the things I feel like I'm learning,

or some of the things that maybe this, this strange experience is teaching me, is teaching us.

You know, it's something that I've thought about across the years, but now feels like the most present thing is just the primacy of our bodies.

And I've thought so much about how in the Western world, and in modernity, we've, we've just structured so many sophisticated and inventive ways of pretending like everything doesn't always come back to our bodies that we, you know, it begins and ends in our bodies.

And, and there's mess and frailty there and limitation, but also energy and, you know, life itself.

And so one of the things I've been thinking about is this, you know, what I'm calling Zoom's Austin.

The technology is so miraculous, but this experience of only connecting to each other by way of pixels is also really laying out, you know, some of the very severe limitations of it.

And so, you know, one thing I've become aware of is what I, what I think that I've never thought about before, but I think how much energy we actually draw from each other, like raw energy at a primal animal level when we are in the room together.

And that that doesn't communicate through this screen, you know, the view of someone's face, and to some extent the emotional, the emotion is that can be read and responded to their, the voice, which I feel is so embodied.

But I think that the way I feel and everybody I'm talking to feels so completely worn out and depleted by the only connection being by way of technology has something to do with the fact that we were not, we're not replenishing just our basic stores of life energy.

And so, I think that, you know, what I'm realizing now is that that happens all the time, it happens whether I'm enjoying being with somebody or not enjoying being with somebody, it happens, and no matter what we are talking about, or if we're sitting silently in a room together, it's a physical animal thing.

And so, I'm just, I'm pondering, you know, what that, what a new, deep and sense of that means why it matters.

You know, at the same time, I think we're learning ways to use these technologies for connection.

We're learning by way of things that go well and things that don't go badly, they will also serve us. It's just, it's both and.

And what's interesting to me too about this is that I am such an introvert. And there's part of me that's a very comfortable being alone. But this thing I'm talking about, this is not an introverted thing, it's not an extraverted thing, it's a human thing, it's an animal thing.

I've been thinking also about strangely, that one reason poetry is becoming even more of a connector, kind of a lifeline, is because poetry is actually language.

It's, it's a form of words as much as it's words. And it's actually language that lands in our bodies as much as in our minds. And it plants us in our bodies.

It plants us in memory, in sensation, and emotion, it connects those things up with words and ideas and concepts.

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