"Just as a potter's choices for glazing enhance a pot without betraying its basic character, so, too, the choices we make about basic needs — food, clothing, shelter, and work — can either drain or nurture our souls. We can treat those things as economic factors — or as soulwork. Fresh food, grown locally and cooked lovingly with a sense of celebration, invites a special kind of community around the table. It does more than 'stoke the engine' for productivity — it becomes a lens through which we can taste and touch and be in communion with the whole web of life.

"Clothing, too, can enliven or deaden the soul. Like glazing, clothing can enhance or distract. It can be practical and beautiful, mass-produced in sweatshops, or purchased with care and consciousness. Although I like to dress simply and travel lightly, I buy most of my jackets at craft fairs, where I can talk with the person who made them and know that my money is supporting handwork here and abroad. When we travel to Guatemala, I look for women's cooperatives, so the money I would spend on clothes will encourage local weavers.

"It's becoming obvious that fuel prices will shape our decisions about where and how to live. The size and location of our houses, accessible public transportation, and green construction will be choices that we can all make — or not. Those decisions will have not only economic ramifications, but spiritual consequences, too.

"If we understand ourselves to be part of a worldwide system in which there are limited resources but nearly unlimited imagination, those choices do not need to be a terrible burden. Instead, they are simply the parameters for introducing playfulness and choice.

"Like the work of glazing, soulwork requires knowledge, practice, and imagination. We have a choice to look closely at the patterns and forms of our daily lives, to engage all of our senses, to enhance our meals, rooms, and even our bodies in ways that honor the basic character of the earth and ourselves. We have the choice to exercise creativity in ways that change the promise of our future."