Hallelujah!
It's long been recognized that many people have a strong emotional interconnectedness with the weather. Seasonal affective disorder (with the incredibly apt acronym SAD) is a real phenomenon, affecting 6% of the population each year (with another 20% or so exhibiting at least mild symptoms). It's serious, too. No less a body than the Mayo Clinic encourages people not to "brush off that yearly feeling as simply a case of the 'winter blues' or a seasonal funk that you have to tough out on your own." As someone who's had a life-long relationship with depression, I would echo that advice.
Is there an analogous interconnectedness between weather and our spirituality? It might be hard to tease this apart from the effect weather has on our emotions, yet I do believe that our spiritual lives and our emotional lives are not mere clones of one another. They are connected, to be sure. What in life isn't connected to everything else? This is one of the fundamental truths of Buddhism, sometimes called "dependent co-origination," and sometimes more simply, "this is, because that is." Nothing exists unless everything else exists, because nothing exists entirely independently. How can we think, then, that body-mind-spirit-emotion aren't inextricably linked?
Nonetheless, just because things are linked does't mean that they are identical, so I return to my wondering: is there a link between our spirits and the seasons analogous to that between the weather and our emotions?
I'd love to hear your thoughts ...
Pax tecum,
RevWik
