Sumari cities are states of mind. They are quite as real as physical cities, more real, if the truth be known, and they have their own boundaries, cultures, crafts, and trades. Some people are travelers, visiting one city after another, and sometimes even living in two cities at once, for in the Sumari cities, moods and thoughts are like streets, alleys, or wide boulevards, all existing together and intersecting.

So, two Sumari cities can become one all of a sudden, without bothering the inhabitants at all, who are simply aware of the added richness of their surroundings, and an astonishing freshness of experience that they hadn’t noticed before. In other words, the boundaries can shift and change constantly, with streets and paths always appearing and disappearing.

A Sumari city can suddenly become very small also, with dark hills springing up closely about it, shutting out the sunshine and hemming in the shops until it seems that the city has no room in which to grow.

Now, each person alive really lives in a Sumari city, or in several at the same time, no matter where he or she lives in the world outside. And all of the real work and creativity takes place first in these inner Sumari landscapes. People visit them at night when they’re asleep in the outside world, but even when they’re awake outside, some part of them is always aware of their citizenship in the inside world.

Of course, a whole Sumari reality is involved, with its own mental continents, countries, oceans, and deserts that are inner counterparts of the world outside. Only, the Sumari world is there … or here … all the time. I mean, you live in it whether you’re alive or dead in outside terms. So it’s very durable, and forms the physical world that you’re beginning to know. But the Sumari world is more responsive, and changeable, because—well, everything moves by thought and feeling. And as you’ll soon discover, people’s feelings change all the time.

So, worried people all together in one inner city might make a mountain tower above them, dark and threatening, so that everyone stops what they’re doing to look up at it, and worry some more. But their worrying just makes the mountain higher, and darker, and more threatening. But even then, some wise child or man or woman will say, sooner or later, “Our worrying only makes the mountain grow more frightening. So let’s unworry it away. Let’s ignore it, and see what happens.” And if enough people listen and follow those suggestions, then in a twinkling the mountain disappears, and the city is free of it.