This is such a strange time.
I am finding myself feeling emotions that I didn't know were there.
Because of the increase in mass shootings, I can no longer read almost any murder mysteries. I still like the mystery concept, but almost all of these books are about solving murders, and even the intelligent British ones that I've liked up until now, I cannot tolerate any more. Ditto their television versions, "Vera", "Shetland", etc. I cannot find the original "Law and Order" on regular TV right now, but I think the same will apply to it.
One sort of bizarre exception to this, the last few weeks, has been "Dateline". Maybe it is Keith Morrison's hypnotic voice, or maybe the fact that it is so formulaic and predictable...or the fact that it's too hot to try new things. I always realize, me being me, that there is some kind of lesson in everything, and last night I figured out what it has been. So many episodes involve a woman going missing (and, more often than not, turning up dead). In almost every case, there appears to be a loving family searching tirelessly for her, and/or for justice. It's like I am watching people from another planet. I have tried to imagine my own family tirelessly searching for me if I had disappeared at any point in my life, and perhaps I am being unfair to them, but I just cannot see it. I would have searched for them (at least until recently) but I just don't think it would have happened the other way around. The episode last night was actually a far more complex story about a little girl being abducted and spending her whole life trying to find her birth family. In the end, she does, and there are warm, tearful, genuine expressions of love and hugs all around. I burst into tears, of course.
I have no memory of my parents ever hugging me (although I must have been held as an infant, before I could walk). As an adult, I would try to hug them when I saw them after a long absence, but they just couldn't do it. My brothers did this odd, arms-encircling-you-then-just-tapping-you-on-the-shoulder thing. It was like I had leprosy. And I guess, in a way, I did have something they either barely had, or couldn't deal with being infected with -- a modest capacity to love.
And, as most of you know, the one thing on earth I have loved thoroughly and unconditionally ever since I can remember, and it's a country: England. And England is currently on fire.
So it's a really, really strange time. The paradox: to find and really feel the threads of past and present pain, rejection, fear...and yet not to get too stuck in that place. To go, "Wow, now I get it!" and try to keep looking forward in love. If I can love one thing today, that will be a big accomplishment.
