What Is Truly Essential To Living? ``things'' Set The U.s. Apart From Most Of The World.

I spent November and December creating bowls, cups and plates at the Pottery Guild in Davenport, Iowa. As I played with the clay, I often thought about how familiar this ancient art is: People have been forming vessels from the earth for about as long as there have been people. The basic techniques have changed very little in those millennia.

Like spinning and weaving and so many other things, pottery is an art still practiced in many cultures out of sheer necessity, but in ours only as a luxury. Few people in this country who make bowls do so because they need bowls; most do so because their sale brings in a little cash, or it's a fun hobby, or they make nice gifts. Nothing wrong with any of that, except that it reminds me once more of how out of touch we Americans have become with what I'd call essential living.

Essential living is how humans survived, more or less, before the industrial revolution. Work nearly always meant providing directly for the essentials of life - food, clothing, shelter, health - whether it was the feudal landlord's or slaveholder's essentials or one's own. Things were made by tool-fashioning people, not machines, and an increased demand for sandals meant that more people would be spending more time making sandals. While I can't claim that it was always just or good, the work was at least performed by and for human beings and directly addressed their basic needs.

Today our modern lifestyles are characterized by nonessentials. It's not just that we clutter our lives with Dixie cup dispensers and electric shoes and plastic plants. Over centuries, but mostly in the past decade, our society has traded a direct connection with the means to sustain our lives for a lifestyle of disconnected, meaningless frivolity. Earthen vessels for Styrofoam.