Have you seen the show Hoarders? It’s fascinating — the wild extreme of American materialism. Homes literally caving beneath the weight of accumulated objects. Teetering piles, abandoned rooms, plumbing shut off for years, goats eating through walls. It gets pretty gothic. The show brings in family members, psychiatrists, organization experts, and a crew of junk-removal guys (saints, really) to try to find the home in the home. The narratives are riveting of how, why. And without fail, after every episode, I promptly stand up and load the dishwasher or take a bag of clothes to Goodwill. If ever you need motivation to clean, cue up the DVR and record this.

When my parents came from Cuba in 1960, they left everything. My father was sent alone at age 14 through a CIA program called Operation Peter Pan, and my mother’s family came with a single suitcase (photos, statue of St. Barbara) after their home was taken by the government. And while they worked their way to upper middle class and liked nice things, the message was always: objects are nothing, and be prepared to lose everything at any time. As I child I reacted against this — stamp collections, doll collections, saving every note passed in school. When I saw Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives as a young adult, I thought: I want that — a library-like home, walls lined in books. The comfortable weight of things. And now, well, between many interstate moves and an abiding wanderlust, I almost see it as a personal failure that all my belongings don’t fit in a car, or a suitcase. A few years ago I was technically living in SF but working almost full-time in Seattle for about a year and, while it was a pain in the ass, I also enjoyed the lightness of my life being one car, one suitcase, a laptop computer, an iPod and a phone.

Of course that all sounds precious given what’s happened in Haiti, and on our shores, and everywhere pretty much. But it’s interesting to think of what is essential, what objects remain sacred to people even when they have lost everything else. Yesterday I came across [thanks LL] this photography project called What I Keep that profiles the members of The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, TX — often homeless, or finding their way back from incarceration or addictions — holding the one object that they can’t live without and telling why. It is very moving. Most of us in this country have the luxury of well-padded caves, and from that vantage people like to think about this — it’s partly why Survivor is interesting to watch and playing “desert island discs” is fun. Who are we stripped down? What would we save in the fire? Examining our lives, pruning them back to the stems, cherishing the important things and creating space for new growth. We don’t always get to choose what we can keep — health, people we love, the hat on our head from blowing away — but it is worth thinking about what surrounds us daily, what is intentional and useful and worth feeding. What can we do without?