every voyage into the mountains will furnish the answer

Song and story, like music, dance and painting, are separate though related. They are sisters, the Greeks said; daughters of one mother, whose name is Mnemosyne: memory, minding, the mind. Their father is the weather. Story and song, in other words, are daughters of knowing, playing at taking their mother's place. Their dwelling, like their mother's - every language seems to know this - is the mountains. Mountain means the wild, in the earth and in the mind. It means the living system, not a replica managed by humans for human ends. Mountains are where humans, with their self-centered notions of order and management, and their narrow definitions of profit and economy, have not yet reached, or have not yet taken control. Greed and fear will post a question: How can the home of knowing by where human organization has not reached? But every voyage into the mountains will furnish the answer: it cannot be anywhere else.

- Robert Bringhurst, from his essay "Everywhere Being is Dancing, Knowing is Known" in Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays & Interviews (Quarry Press, 1995).