The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

know that sentience or intelligence isn’t a thing, you can’t find it in, or analyze it out from, the cells of a brain. It’s a function of the connected cells. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness.

“A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies,” Tomiko said, “and interpret it as Love.”