Trick Knees, Weathervanes and Other Sympathies with Nature

by Kim, September 18, 2009 at 6:00am

Today through my office window I watched the unchanging gray sky slanted with drizzle; the humidity seemed to have seeped inside my bones. Many of us have some type of physical reaction to the weather; some even claim to be able to predict it through a twinge in a joint. There is some scientific basis for the phenomenon; barometric pressure and humidity have been known to cause symptoms in arthritis, migraine, and multiple sclerosis patients.

As a migraine sufferer myself, waking up to the pitter-patter of rain on the roof is a bad omen. Today I started thinking of the weather-predicting body part with a different focus, a softer lens in keeping with the cloudy day. After all, in our passage through life we tend to pick up a few knocks and bumps; it is just these "imperfections" that can bring us closer to something that is always a truth, even when we have forgotten it: we are all creatures of nature. The birds that fall silent before a tornado; the animals that flee the path of a hurricane--they have not lost their connection to the natural. Maybe it is possible to experience one's symptoms as a wisdom, localized to only a trick knee.

The idea reminds me of Freudian-era psychologist Alfred Adler's notion of organ inferiority.In his view, children are born with organs or physical traits; driven to compensate for them, asthmatics like Theodore Roosevelt or Che Guevara push themselves to accomplish more than average. The organ acts as a kind of catalyst, or, in the case of the weathervane-knee, a type of aperture to another order. The joint that swells in the rain is reacting no differently than a tree branch expanding in the damp. So if part of your body can't help but react to the weather, hopefully you can see it as a kind of wisdom, a secret sympathy proper to a creature of nature