The grassy hill above the Faire is warm and drowsy with sunlight. The elves are busy below, constructing God-knows-what in the groves between the trees.

“What are they working on?”

“Don’t you know?” Balthazar asks, amused.

“Rarely,” I reply. “This whole creativity thing is bailing wire and duct tape.”

“You could work on that,” Darzee says. She has a leaf, shaped like a delicate spade, and a sketchbook. She is sketching with her finger, and it marks on the paper like graphite. It reminds me that I downloaded a drawing program for my iPod so I could practice drawing whenever I wanted to.

“I could?” I ask. I lay back, too lazy and weary to take her very seriously. The sun is warm and nice, and baking in it is much more pleasurable than thinking.

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t you know why you are tired yet?”

“Because I’ve been working damn hard?”

She snorts. “Of course not. No one gets tired from working.”

Bathazar looks as incredulous as I feel, which makes me feel better. “Really.”

“Thwarted desire is tiresome. Frustration is tiresome. Misplaced drive is tiresome. Creativity invigorates, just like exercise, like enjoyment, like love.”

“I’ve been exhausted by all those things,” I protest. The sounds of hammers and saws and industry drift up from the little clearing below.

Darzee puts her sketchbook down carefully on top of her leaf to keep it from blowing away. “Have you been tired? Or just done?”

“Done?”

“Don’t be obtuse or polite. You’ve been somewhere doing something and you are done. The activity has brought you as much enjoyment as it is going to in that moment, and it’s time to move on to something new for a while. Perception is always everything. You are spending your days now surrounded by people who see the world, and their work, in one common way. You can buy in, or not.”

“Work isn’t exhausting,” I say, just to see what it sounds like to say it. It is so much easier to just agree with everyone else. I wish I knew why it was so comforting to just fall in to this endless groove. But I don’t feel as tired. I don’t feel as worried or resentful. “Work *isn’t* exhausting.” Is it easier? Why do I think it is easier to be tired?

“Oh, I know that one,” Balthazar says. “Because you get to shed responsibility for your own happiness.”

Darzee shakes her head impatiently. “You should have tatooed your forehead. The point was not to forget.”

“I’ve got stuff to do,” I say, and stand up. The breeze is cool and refreshing. I am headed down to rescue the poor elves, who are trying to build sets from my vague concepts about the latest novel idea. Time to start working out some worldbuilding kinks.

Tags: balthazar, darzee, faire

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 am and is filed under chats with Oasis folk, descriptions of the Oasis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.