Magnetic Declination

Lessons From The Land

There it was, dashed against the concrete, one single upper left wing in the mulching leaves by the side of the garden path. Beauty lost to the earth, a flash of colour in the dark, bringing lessons from the air to remind us that sometimes life is fleeting and intangible. Sometimes we must surrender ourselves to the unknown.

I picked up the tiny peacock butterfly wing, no more than 3cm in length, between my thumb and forefinger, and placed it in my journal pushing it to the back of my mind to mull over its symbolic nature at a later date. I was not sure when that would be, but certainly when I was not rushing to feed the chickens and guinea pigs, before doing the school run.

This one took a little while to ponder but the words came to me a few weeks later: ‘Magnetic Declination’. Magnetic declination is the distance between true north and magnetic north, more specifically the angle. Magnetic north responds to the earth’s magnetic fields and true north is geographic north. So, the north we find on maps.

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

Some animals, including several species of butterfly, use magnetic north to migrate. And so it was that there was the true message. That little wing, was pointing me to magnetic north, reminding me that we may feel compelled, as the rest of society does, to follow true north, the course mapped out as the right way, but we also may find ourselves instead drawn to magnetic north. A liminal space between the two, that looks likes its going off course, lost and disorientated but actually it’s just magnetic declination. It’s still north.

This lead me to the stories of those who move from the geographical path set by society and follow their magnetic north. If you read on I will share them with you.