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I knew I was in trouble when I turned into Target's parking lot for the third time that week. At home, I could hardly get much work done for thinking about a pair of sandals I had eyed on an earlier trip. (They were perfect—comfort able but with a little chunky heel that gave me some height.) I left the house with nothing more on my mind than whether they would have a bright red sale sticker on their tag.

The world is too much with us;
late and soon,
Getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away,
a sordid boon!
—William Wordsworth, 1806

Like the Sirens' song, the sandals lured me down the highway and in front of the shoe rack. No luck. They were still full price, $14.99, which under our current family budget may as well have been a hundred.

But instead of heading directly home, I spent an hour there, lifting the colorful, trendy trinkets over my head to peer underneath at the prohibitive price tags. By the time I got back into the car empty-handed, maybe two o'clock in the afternoon, I was exhausted and disappointed. On the way home, pictures of myself—aimless, shuffling through Target—played in my mind like a sad, silent movie.

That day it had been Target, but it could have been any number of retail haunts or thrift shops where my search takes me. At home, I often get overtaken by a feeling that something is missing, so I usually get in the car to go find it. I might be looking for a way to express my innermost self and think picking out a doodad at the Dollar Tree may do that. Or, like a junkie, I roam the streets, trying to escape some kind of inner emptiness by getting an instant fix at Home Depot. Why do I first seek an outlet for my angst at the outlets?

But in this period of my life, where discretionary income means the nickels, dimes, and an occasional quarter I find at the bottom of the washing machine, I am extremely vulnerable to the tactics of the evil twins of Consumerism and Advertising. Although they promise me a mass- produced personal style, what I really want from them is the comfort of their overwhelming conformity. As a Christian, I know that I am not to be conformed to this world, but I just never realized that the alternative—being transformed from within—would cut into my buying habits.

We took the fork in the road
One explanation for my heightened preoccupation with goods, not to mention the more heady world of services, could be a decision our family made about four years ago. My husband Fritz—a highly creative, exuberant person with a large soul, as a friend put it—grew less and less tolerant of his status being so quo. For ten years he had been in financial sales, a world where every month one's production and, consequently, one's apparent worth was measured in numbers, ranked in descending order, and publicly posted. He fared well in that world, but he tried to ignore a growing voice inside that was calling him to something new.

While Fritz struggled, he encouraged me to pursue my long dormant love of art. Still in my twenties, with three sons under the age of five, I needed some mental relief. I bought a bag of clay. In that confining era of young children, to slam lumps of clay on the table (and only rarely against the wall) did me great psychological good. Then forming it into teapots and figures and ultimately starting a basement-run business renewed a sense of control over my circumstances. More importantly, it somehow made me feel like myself again. My creativity and energy levels soared. But as Fritz watched me come back to life, I think it made him feel even more dead.

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November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13