Nobody's Kidding Nobody About Where It Goes

Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad

The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge
and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony,
the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime,
when the Ancestors emerged
to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began
to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace.
As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered

a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints.
Depending on where they fell,
these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape.
Thus the world was covered by Dreaming-tracks that lay over the land as “ways” of communication, each track having its corresponding Song. To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.
--Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot