“Mercy,” I say, throwing myself down in the Conversation Tent.

Darzee cracks a lazy eye. “You give up?” She’s all snuggled in with Balthazar. It’s a warm, lazy day.

“I’m done in,” I acknowledge.

“Well, you’d have to be,” Harley says. “Going on like you have been for way too long.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re insufferable?” I ask her. Harley is my worse-if-wiser-self, and also is the sole keeper of any and all creativity that I might ever possess.

“Often. Though usually it’s Anne saying it. Speaking of, is there any particular reason you’ve been letting her have her head lately?”

(more…)

I think I want too much at once.

“Not possible,” Darzee says. We are sitting in the Conversation Tent, lazing about and chatting idly.

“How do you know these things?” Balthazar asks, half awed and half frustrated.

A question I’d love an answer to, but a thoughtful voice breaks in on the conversation. “It’s not wanting too much. It’s wanting it all right now.”

A man made of blue lounges in the tent. He is not a man; he has simply chosen to look like one. He is a water dragon who followed me home from a Chinese exhibit at a museum a few years ago. His name is Tau.

“There you are,” I say. I have not spoke to Tau in months.

“I am always here,” he reprimands me lightly. “You have such trouble listening.”

There’s no point in going over that. How does one correctly balance life in two worlds? I route the conversation back to the topic at hand.

“How can I want it too soon? According to all reports, once you line your thoughts up with your desires the universe should bring it to you *poof!* In an instant.”

“You know that’s not how it works,” he says. “That’s just how you *want* it to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“An instant is never an instant,” Tau says. “*Poof* is never like snapping your fingers. In other words, you can’t get something for nothing. You can want it, and you can be in line with it, and the universe can bring it to you, but without motion there cannot be shifting, or change. You move, and in your movement the opportunities come.”

“So you have to move towards something to get it.”

“Exactly,” Tau says. “That’s your biggest problem. You’ve already got the physics of it. Initial inertia is the hardest to overcome. And in this particular scenario, the universe can’t overcome it. You have to push. You have to start the movement. However hard it is to get momentum up, that is what you have to do. And that is why it seems to take so long. Because you have to get continuous motion going. Once you have that, the universe can work with the energy you’ve created.”

“That almost makes sense. But why is it so hard to get things in motion?”

Tau sniffs and leans back in his chair. “Oh now that,” he says. “That’s the thing you keep struggling with and making a huge mess out of, isn’t it?”

I am standing in the Conversation Tent in the Oasis.

The Tent is an Arabian tent bigger than most living rooms. Three of its four sides are rolled up, letting in the sun and the wind. The Conversation Tent is, in actuality, outside the walls of the Oasis and therefore has a beautiful, unhindered view of the ocean in the distance. And because it is magic, the Tent cannot be seen from outside the Oasis; one has to approach it from the path inside the Oasis walls or one will never find it at all.

A medium-sized firepit made of glazed tile sits in the middle of the Tent, and inviting couches and cushions ring the backside of the fire, positioned out to admire the view. There is usually tea to be had as well, because we are civilized, here in the Oasis.

(more…)