So maybe it’s just a pot. Maybe the Greek guys were right. Yet it strikes me, looking into the maw of this volatile and strangely comforting furnace, that our foolhardy canoe slipping downriver into the current of an unruly past is bringing back something that the future needs. A sense of the vitality of the frankly physical. The nitty-gritty joy of sheer cussedness. The primal and transformative power of clay and blood and bone and raw human doing-ness that can’t be conveniently abstracted away by the intellectual arbiters of an overcrowded lockstep world. The fugitive pleasures of fun. The potters, the weavers, the carvers, the hand people, are our wild children and our pioneers and our roots. Let them feed the fires. Let them float the canoes. Likely as not, we’ll be needing what they know. ~Bob Hicks, Free Lance writer for the "Oregonian".