I saw a mood ring at Urban Outfitters the other day, and it reminded me of growing up and loving to wear those. I loved watching the colors change on my finger. I laughed at the outcome, and even as it wasn’t accurate, I still wanted to believe. What about the moon affecting your mood? Do you believe the moon has an effect on your behavior? We hear people say a lot—“Must be a full moon or something.” But is there truth in it?

In an article in BBC online this July by Linda Geddes, there seems to be a shift in people’s minds: “The idea that the lunar cycle can influence people’s behaviour dates back thousands of years, but has been largely dismissed by modern medicine…new research suggests there may be some truth to these ancient theories.”

In a study by psychologist, Thomas Wehr, studying bipolor patients, he was convinced there was something to it and even scientists couldn’t dispute the findings—that the mood swings of the bipolar patients corelated “with certain gravitation cycles of the Moon.” However, most attribute it to sleep, or lack thereof, which disrupts mood not the Moon itself or any mystical correlation. We need sleep. Without it, so much happens. Irritability. Weight gain. Health issues. Anxiety. Brain function. Concentration. And on and on and on. The science is firm there.

But the scientific naysayers still can’t deny that if sleep is interrupted by the moon, there is a connection. Is it a simple solution to get a thicker shade the night the moon may be strong? More curtains? Or is there something intrinsic really going on. Wehr thinks so. He states:
​“ ‘In the modern world, there’s so much light pollution and we spend so much time indoors exposed to artificial light, that the signal of the changing levels of moonlight has been obscured,’ he explains. Rather, he suspects that some other aspect of lunar influence is perturbing his patients’ sleep, with knock-on consequences for their mood – with the most likely candidate being the Moon’s gravitational pull.”

Do you remember when you were little, and you’d look up at the clouds and wonder how they were moving? Or thought they were fluffy places to go sleep like pillows of cotton? Or even looked up and saw something in them, an animal or a face? The white against the blue sky so beautiful, you knew it, even really young, that there was something inexplicable about the way it looked. You knew beauty. It awed you. It felt a lot like the ocean flipped upside down, instead, above you, like a mirror image, and you felt those feelings of peace and tranquility in just the colors.

Now, it seems, we’re more interested in our laptops or phones or taking the next best picture of the clouds to share with our social media friends instead of just looking up at them and marveling or stopping to breath them in, to place a blanket down on the ground and stay still on our backs, eyes gazing into the nothingness or perhaps some great somethingness, taking comfort in knowing that while we DO know why those clouds are moving now, there’s still something magical about it.

Today was one such day. Those clouds against a picture-perfect blue sky where the clouds were effortlessly rolling by without a care. And so, I took a bit of time to enjoy them. Driving, I pulled over into a park, and just sat. Phone off. No laptop. No taking a pic to post to show everyone, and I felt like a kid without a care in the world for a few moments. No worries but the moment in front of me, like those clouds themselves.

Fall does that anyway. That crisp air, not too cold, not too hot, but just right, the smell of youth and new beginnings. And I could feel the tears before they came, the bottled-up emotions of stress and lack of time and the constant: I must. I must. I must do. But I don’t. I don’t HAVE to do. And lately, I’ve been realizing just that. We have a whole world going on with or without us. The clouds are still going to move whether I make a post on Facebook or send out a tweet or sell books or worry about people doing what they say they will do. The clouds, however, will be constant. And the sky. And the sun setting and rising. And the musts. So I decided, I’m going to embrace the mustn’ts for a change, even if for one series of short moments strung together.
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And I swear, I saw a rocking horse in one of the clouds as I was packing up to leave. It's what inspired this blog. But you’ll get no proof from me. Nope. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to believe me…that magical moments can still happen – if we take the time to make them.