Amid the basalt, thick among the sandstone and limestone monoliths, energies reside. So we were told.

My wife and I, rubes when it comes to rock-enhanced spirituality, stood in vortex country.

In Sedona, among the buttes, mesas and spires of northern Arizona, great formations of red stone create magnetic fields purported to energize humans.

Hiking near Cathedral Rock, we feared the rather heavy enchilada lunch at a local restaurant might be more the source of our current inspiration.

Guide books will point to no fewer than 15 vortex sites around Sedona, places charged with concentrated power for human intuition, empowerment and nurturing. A local industry has arisen in tune with this, with shamans finding work and “emotional release” sessions requiring reservations.

My instinct is not to discount any of this. I put scant stock in the fact my hours in Sedona generated no personal upsweep of energy. Some people would rightly claim my baseline for enlightenment was low to begin with.

The faith in my life, based on something believed without being seen, might seem strange to those whose pilgrimage takes them to the Arizona high desert.

I thought of undetected energy fields recently on hearing the national media refer to a “jobless recovery.”

My faith has its limits. Helpful magnetism, that’s one thing. Economic recovery with a rising unemployment rate, that’s a stretch.

Headlines trembled last week with word of the Dow once more touching the 10,000 mark. Every bull metaphor got a workout.

That the index stood at nearly 14,000 two years ago got lesser mention.

With Missouri’s jobless rate jumping 3 percentage points since last October, it’s hard to imagine the bulls running anywhere but in a china shop. (There, I added to the catalog of lame metaphors.)

When people lack jobs, they not only lack an income. They also find an easier route to doubting the economy depends on the cumulative labors of the many.

Insignificance is bad motivation for any work force.

It helps not at all that Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that took and repaid $10 billion in taxpayer bailout money, stands poised to give its employees up to $20 billion in bonuses for 2009. That’s an average of about $630,000 per worker.

The bailout money went to stabilize the economy. In the Goldman Sachs corner of the world, it apparently worked.

An article in the Washington Post on Monday suggested that the nation now suffers from “frugal fatigue,” a condition caused by people laying off the shopping because of economic uncertainty.

Staying at home and saving money, people insisted, no longer fit their lifestyle. Some strappy high heels prove a tonic.

This conflicts with a University of Michigan index, released last week, that showed consumer sentiment down four points from September.

In Buchanan County, retail employment has an increasing importance; according to the federal County Business Patterns report, the number of retail employees rose here from 4,431 in 1998 to 6,371 in 2007.

Since 2007, some stores have opened and some storefronts have gone begging. The retail season in the offing will tell a lot about our economic confidence.

For the jobless, talk of recovery offers little energy.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday.