The Mind-Weather Connection

On my honeymoon in London, my favorite place to visit was Hampstead Heath, where John Keats’ House is. Mike and I wandered around on a cloudy November afternoon, my heart pounding as I walked in every room, imagining the spirit of my favorite British poet. Before we left, I bought a mug with a quote from “Ode to a Nightingale”—O for a beaker full of the warm South—to take home with me. Every time Mike sees it, he tells me how sad it makes him because it serves as a reminder of how Keats went to Italy to bide more time before succumbing to the tuberculosis that killed him.

Doctors did tell Keats to retreat to a warmer climate rather than damp London in hopes that he might recover, at least for a little while. Science backs up the long-held internal knowledge that like plants, we need sun in order to thrive. But how else does weather affect our moods or impact our emotions on any given day?

Western culture already ignores the significance of a mind-body connection, eschewing common, centuries-old practices that cure common ailments from a sore back to suburban malaise. But do we also ignore a mind-weather connection? Can we at least give some credit to nature for helping to alter our moods?

Any person who works in a hospital will tell you the crazies come out during a full moon. Women’s bodies tend to be especially attuned to lunar phases. And all last week, weather anchors crunched their shoulders and stared into the cameras like rats as they forecasted the oncoming hurricane. But it wasn’t only reporters in cheap suits from Macy’s that were getting worked up. Other people became animal-like, too. My children, for instance. (And okay, fine, yes, me too.)

On Saturday morning, before the hurricane, neighbors went to work putting away patio furniture and tying down chairs and flower pots, while buzzing nerves skittered through my body like a swarm of bees. It wasn’t until after midnight that the violent winds and rain hit us, and I woke to swirling voices that carried through the trees. First, I thought I heard a baby crying. Then, a woman’s yell and later, music. I was reminded of Tim O’Brien’s novels, passages which describe the freakish, mysterious noises of the jungle in the Vietnam War. There was a rational explanation for the voices I heard, though: some idiots were outside having a party and proving Darwin’s theory of natural selection. (No one was actually hurt.) Yet the echoes and whispers sounded like the personality of the hurricane itself, and I understood very much why she had the name Irene.

All night, I tossed and turned, frantically moving from bedroom window to living room window, wondering if the large trees across the street would become victims of Irene’s wrath, followed by our house, then us, my children sleeping innocently in their beds. Should I move the family downstairs? Could I do the physics calculations necessary to determine whether we’d be safe if the beautiful tree broke in half? Against the dark gray of the sky, the shaking branches looked like frightened old women.

By the next morning, the hurricane had largely passed, but we were still enduring heavy winds and the humidity that was left over, seeping through the windows. My mood fell as I became overwhelmed with the clean-up of our basement and end-of-summer tasks. But by late in the afternoon, the sun gleamed against houses and the very same trees, which seemed utterly relieved to remain intact. The breeze was cool, autumnal. Our emotions had calmed down, and everything felt normal again, hopeful, even.

In a very surreal way, I felt tied to that hurricane, the swirling inside my head and my spirit mimicking the gusts of the storm. And now, on a bright sunny Monday morning, I am grateful that both storms have passed.

Do you see a connection of your mood to nature?

Image: “Sun Drenched” by Digimist via Flickr using a Creative Commons license.

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Tagged as: Darwin, hurricane, hurricane irene, John Keats, Keats' House, natural selection, Ode to a Nightingale, Tim O'Brien, tuberculosis