In a recent post, Dennis Pitocco wrote how our values provide us with a “true North”. So, let’s dig a little into this phenomenon. Not the proverbial version, but the one provided by Mother Earth.
I don’t know if you did this exercise in a science class a long time ago: You place a magnet stick under a piece of kitchen towel or ink blot paper and scatter some iron dust on the paper. The dust will form beautiful lines on both sides of the magnet from one end to the other in ever larger arches. (Should you be inspired to try this again, the paper is important for you to see the lines. And don’t put one end of the magnet into the jar of iron dust. You will never get it off again. Please don’t ask how I know this.)
Magnets are one of nature’s wonders. In “the good old days” people paid fortunes for a good magnet stone. Magnets were used for many exotic purposes. They were used in folk medicine. Mesmer – the Austrian doctor from whom we have the word mesmerizing – used magnetized iron bars to cure his clients. Tea merchants brought magnets when they bought tea to make sure that the big boxes had not been made artificially heavy by adding old iron flakes – that look very much like black tea leaves – to the shipment. Pass a magnet through the tea and if it comes out full of iron flakes the seller is a crook.
You may also have learned Oersted’s Law in a science class. Hans Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820, without which we would have no electro motors, refrigerators, hair dryers, electric light bulbs, … because, outside of using a battery, electricity is basically made by turning an electric coil around a big magnet. All the various energy sources involved in making electricity – coal, gas, atomic (and in some places burning your household non-compostable waste) – is for heating water to turn the turbines that hold the coils. Water and wind can turn them directly but otherwise, the process involves good old-fashioned steam engines. (Now I’ll have to go figure out how solar cells work – yikes, I should stop myself from entertaining this writing urge. It always goes to the next thing…)
As you may remember – from yet another science class – you are sitting on a really really big magnet. Your compass points North because the magnetic pole is located somewhere up there. It is, however, not located on the North Pole – an important thing to remember should one take a ship and sail around the Arctic Ocean navigating by compass and charts alone. And the Magnetic Pole[1], the one attracting your compass needle, is moving around – pretty fast actually. If you are located in the USA, the geographical North Pole and the Magnetic Pole are generally in the same direction, so your compass course is not dangerously off. This is the reason we have the phrase “true North”: compass course didn’t and still doesn’t direct quite as accurately as Stellar Polaris, the North Star.
This is a longish introduction to the odd phenomenon among aboriginal Australians that they traditionally have given “where” references by using absolute, not relative, direction. They wouldn’t say “You stand in front of me” or “…left of me” but “You stand East of me” or “…North of me”. And should they tell a story about somebody walking in a direction and signal that walking direction, they will signal the direction the person actually moved, not how they moved relatively to the speaker but to planet Earth. Telling the same story when they have turned around, they will use the opposite hand to show the direction.
What is that sense of where we are on Earth? And do we all have it? Do we lose it because we are not learning it is important? Is it important to anybody but Aboriginals?
When a child’s brain wires together in the first years of the child’s life, it sprouts synapses left and right because, to a young child, everything is new, fascinating, and worth paying attention to. Toddlers end up with around twice as dense a neural network as they will have just a few years later. There is only that much space up there behind the eyebrows, and if the neural pathways are not traveled – the stimuli missing or not engaged with – they will be pruned away to make room for what evidently is more important, as per indicated by what the people around the child pay attention to. If a parent is deaf or color blind, the child’s brain may end up connected much differently than if the parent is a musician or a painter. And if the parent doesn’t feel Earth’s magnetic force pulling in all their iron-filled red blood cells (or is aware that they do), how could they possibly convey the meaning of that feeling to their child?
Is that even how Aboriginals orientate – by being sensitive that way to magnetism? Geo-position vis a vis the poles, the stars, and the magnetic field? I don’t know. Birds and butterflies seem to rely on the magnetic field to find their migratory flight routes.
As I look up from the keyboard, quite a lot of electric gadgets and outlets are all around me. Electricity is running through the walls. Some of that makes a detour through a gadget that is turned on – to give light, run my laptop, charge my phone, heat my tea…but the current is there, available, regardless of whether I turn anything on or not.
I have not tried to move a compass close to any of the gadgets, but I have this odd theory that it is so healthy for us to spend time in nature, not only be because of what nature provides of natural sounds, sunlight, and oxygen but also because of what is not there: electric disturbances to our inner magnetic compasses.
And should you wonder why it feels like the world is going to H in a handbasket, it might be because the iron core in the center of the planet is slowing down, possibly getting ready to change the polarity of the planet, as it has done many times before – but quite long ago by now.
Then your compass needle will tell you that the sun rises in the West. Get ready to get your true North tested.
[1] The magnetic north pole is moving from Canada towards Siberia at a rate of approximately 55 km (34 mi) per year. NOAA gives the 2024 location of the magnetic north pole as 86 degrees North, 142 degrees East. By 2025, it will have drifted to 138 degrees East (same latitude).
