We are people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste.

I invite you to trace with me a geography of displacement, where every border crossed became a threshold between holding and releasing. This is more than a story of movement; it is an investigation of the self, excavated through the objects I chose to carry and those I dared to abandon. It is a chronicle of the eternal negotiation between the responsibility of memory and the liberation of letting go.

A Cartography of Becoming

Since leaving Lebanon in 2012, my life has unfolded as a series of urban sediments, each city depositing a layer of wisdom about the nature of possession.

• Dubai taught me the seduction of impermanence, where materials promise eternity yet harbor decay in their very foundations. Between relentless construction and the vanishing desert, I learned my first lesson in futility: yesterday's treasure dissolves into tomorrow's craving.

• Los Angeles revealed accumulation as a horizontal sprawl. Its freeways mapped dreams across an urban desert, and I found myself scattered across "27 different experiences calling themselves LA." The city’s expansiveness taught me that America is not a melting pot, but a mosaic of distinct, simultaneous realities.

• New York City delivered me into the intricate density of the human condition. Here, accumulation meant an accumulation of people—stories piled in after-hour conversations on fire escapes and disappointments carried in the last cars of long subway rides. The city’s mantra, "If you see something, say something," felt ironic in a place where everyone was too busy surviving to speak up.

• The Hudson Valley offered a geological patience. Its hills were a respite from the city’s buzz, reopening my eyes to seasonal wisdom. I remembered that accumulation could be the slow gathering of time itself, and I saw how artists accumulate materials and techniques not as possessions, but as a celebration of creative potential.

• Maine’s rugged coastline stripped away all pretense. The ocean, a familiar anchor from Lebanon, whispered that accumulation without flow becomes stagnation. From lobster traps and the honest embrace of seasonal depression, I learned that sustainable gathering follows natural cycles of fullness and emptiness.

• Saint Catharines, Ontario, was a gentle embrace of hyphenated identities. In this Canadian border city, I witnessed a different kind of accumulation: working-class and white-collar dreams echoing their original cultures, weaving new forms of belonging from remembered fragments.

• Southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert masters the art of essential accumulation. Here, the mighty saguaro cactus grows slowly, storing water for lean seasons, outliving its companions to stand as a silent sentinel. The desert’s stark beauty reveals that abundance and scarcity are not opposites, but partners in a dance of intelligent conservation.

The Cabinet of Relational Curiosities

Each of these places offered its people as gifts. These encounters now rest in what I call my Cabinet of Relational Curiosities—a modest box that is my portable homeland.

Inside are figurines from cherished connections, prints capturing moments of magic, seeds from shared gardens, and even a ziplock bag of ground chili, a "see ya later" gift bearing an expiration date. These are my transitional talismans, artifacts that crystallize past conversations into tangible, touchable presences. They are vessels of meaning, a sacred reliquary that anchors a floating identity in the storm of constant movement. This box is my proof that we participate in the ancient human practice of creating belonging through material culture.

The Sacred and Profane Act of Release

Yet with every arrival came a departure, and with every departure, a spiritual accounting. The question was always the same: What to hold, and what to release?

My furniture—the IKEA lamp that witnessed late writing sessions, the Goodwill plates that held countless shared meals—found new lives with university students. I watched them load my past into their U-Hauls, their excitement palpable as they inherited the promise of belonging. This passing forward felt like participating in a river of human continuity, where objects accumulate new stories with each transfer.

But books demanded a deeper sacrifice. To release them was to acknowledge that the self who collected Rumi and Toni Morrison, who dog-eared bell hooks and Tom Robbins, was dissolving. Their absence taught me a paradoxical freedom: the lightness that comes when external symbols of intelligence no longer define internal worth. The library I had built over years dissolved, its most vital contents migrating from my shelves to my neural pathways. The books themselves had become redundant; their wisdom had already transformed me.

My living room - Tucson, Arizona, 2025

The Paradox of Possession

As a ceramic artist, I work at the intersection of matter and meaning, where every object becomes a vessel for more than its physical form. Accumulation, in my practice, transcends the mere gathering of things—it extends into realms of memory, connection, and metaphysical presence that resist easy categorization.

Each piece that emerges from my studio carries the full context of its creation: the intimacy of hands shaping wet clay, the discerning eye that designed its surface, the specific time of day and quality of light that witnessed its formation. A simple bowl bears the invisible fingerprints of its making—the maker's emotional state, the studio's temperature, the music playing during its conception, both careful considerations and absent-minded gestures. These impressions accumulate like layers of glaze, transforming mere matter into meaning.

The ceramic process itself embodies accumulation's complex dance. Clay gathers form through deliberate addition—coils climbing, walls stretching, surfaces trimming—yet each addition demands strategic subtraction. Too much clay creates structural weakness; too little leaves a vessel unable to fulfill its purpose. The potter accumulates not just material but knowledge: of pressure, timing, balance, learning precisely when to stop, when further intervention becomes interference. Glazing adds another stratum of accumulated consideration, with fine metals and minerals building toward a vision that remains uncertain until the firing is complete.

Then comes the kiln, where accumulation meets its ultimate test in ancient alchemy. High temperatures dissolve some carefully gathered elements while crystallizing others, teaching us that not all accumulated components survive transformation. What emerges is either strengthened through this ordeal or shattered by its inability to withstand change. This process mirrors human development: we accumulate experiences, relationships, and knowledge, but only what integrates authentically with our essential nature survives life's repeated firings.

To accumulate is to accept responsibility for these embedded stories. When I place a handmade cup on my shelf, I become custodian of its maker's intention, guardian of the care invested in its creation. This responsibility extends beyond the object to the entire network of relationships it represents: the mentor who shared glazing techniques in a Brooklyn studio, the friend who fired a piece in their soda kiln, the studio matriarch who demonstrated how paper-thin slabs could create beautiful tea sets. Each piece carries genealogies of knowledge and connection, making its owner part of an ongoing human conversation conducted through cultural transmission.

Museums understand this custodial relationship, dedicating vast resources to preserving accumulated human expression. Yet private accumulation faces different challenges. How do we honor objects' stories while preventing our homes from becoming mausoleums of stuff? The line between collecting and hoarding lies in relationship quality—whether accumulation enhances life or substitutes for it. A collection becomes pathological when objects lose their capacity for meaningful interaction or multiply beyond our ability to engage with them authentically.

Neglected objects transform into waste, their journey to the dumpster delayed but inevitable. The ceramic studio teaches this lesson brutally: shelves fill with test pieces, failed experiments, abandoned projects that once held promise. Clay's patience eventually expires; unfired greenware cracks, dries beyond salvage, and accumulates dust that obscures original intentions. What begins as creative exploration becomes archaeological evidence of distraction, demonstrating how accumulation without purpose degrades into a burden.

Herein lies the paradox: what we gather for meaning becomes meaningless through excess. The hundredth ceramic vessel made for a consumer holds less significance than the first, not because its creation required less skill, but because our appreciative attention dilutes across multiplying objects. Mass production exploits this psychological reality, offering endless variations on familiar forms that promise distinction but deliver homogeneity. The unique becomes generic through repetition; the special becomes ordinary through abundance.

This paradox extends beyond individual psychology into cultural and environmental realms. Societies accumulate technologies, institutions, and traditions that initially serve human flourishing but can rigidify into obstacles to adaptation. Environmental accumulation—carbon in the atmosphere, plastic in oceans, chemicals in soil—demonstrates how beneficial processes repeated beyond natural systems' capacity for integration transform from solution to problem.

An honest ceramic practice offers wisdom for navigating these paradoxes through its emphasis on essential function wedded to aesthetic consideration. Traditional pottery accumulates only features that serve practical or beautiful purposes, creating objects that justify their existence through use and contemplation. This principle suggests that meaningful accumulation requires discrimination—the artist's eye that sees what serves life's enhancement, and the courage to release what merely fills space.

Mirrors and Relics

My movements across geographies have functioned as gentle interrogations of selfhood. Each relocation served as an involuntary audit conducted through my possessions. Moving stripped away the comfort of permanence, forcing me to confront accumulated sediments of identity that had settled in corners, drawers, and forgotten storage boxes. Each packing session became a form of excavation, emotionally unearthing remnants of past selves.

The process begins innocently enough—sorting through obvious categories, making easy decisions about clearly useful or useless items. Deeper excavation reveals more troubling discoveries: the expensive camera bought during a brief passion for photography, now gathering dust while smartphone photos suffice for daily needs; the roller skates embodying romantic visions of coolness, now neglected. These objects reflect who I once hoped to become, testaments to enthusiasms that burned bright before fading into mere possessions.

These items serve as both mirrors and relics, reflecting who I was while I wrestle with them in quiet hours, torn between the desire to hold and the freedom of release. The wrestling match occurs in the liminal space between being and becoming, where my present and future selves negotiate for territory in both consciousness and storage space.

The solitary hours spent sorting possessions become retreats—enforced confrontations with impermanence and attachment that Buddhist teachings describe but Western culture rarely provides opportunities to experience directly. Each decision to keep or release involves micro-enlightenment: small recognitions of how identity solidifies around objects and dissolves when those objects disappear. I, who owned these things, feel both intimately familiar and strangely distant, like viewing childhood photographs where my face is recognizable but the consciousness behind the eyes seems to belong to someone else entirely.

Within this tension lives a deeper metaphor for life itself—that flux defines human experience. We accumulate objects and experiences, relationships, beliefs, and identities, building a sense of solid selfhood from inherently transient materials. Objects become external symbols of internal accumulation, visible representations of invisible processes of growth, change, and evolution. Their weight in boxes parallels the weight of experiences and habits we carry with us.

Moving teaches that personhood itself is another form of accumulation, subject to the same paradoxes of weight and lightness, meaning and burden, that characterize our relationship with material possessions. Just as we must periodically release objects that no longer serve our present reality, we must also release outdated aspects and versions of ourselves, allowing old skin to shed so new ones can be revealed.

The Question of Enough

What is enough? How much must one gather to feel rooted without becoming imprisoned by belongings?

Beyond the Material

Waste encompasses more than discarded objects; it includes emotional residues, lost chances, and forgotten relationships. Society advocates consumption relentlessly, feeding both accumulation and waste. Yet within this tide, accumulation's true value lies in intentionality: making thoughtful choices, valuing craftsmanship, embracing less with greater love.

This mindful stewardship informs my work as creator and educator, teaching the worth of fewer, well-beloved possessions.

The Investigation

Etel Adnan's haunting insight that "We are people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste" summons us to reckon with the material and existential legacies we fashion. My journey through houses, objects, and memories maps this condition's poignant complexity: the weight and release, stories held and relinquished.

Within this tension, my investigation persists: a childlike desire for balance in a reality eternally in motion.

Questions that linger in the space between being and becoming:

• How intentional is my attachment to objects?

• What do relics reveal about the selves I carry, preserve, or abandon?

• How does letting go resonate with my loss of identity through different chapters?

• Could breaking ceramic, an act I find delicious, constitute liberation?

• Can possessions reflect evolving selfhood as I cross life's geography?

Each object retained or released acts as a marker of time and relationship, a testament to human vulnerability and endurance. My treasured box of belongings brings my present and future selves together, a traveler's cabinet of secrets waiting to be revealed. As a ceramicist, the connection between the acts of making, material, artifact, and user remains sacred.

To live lightly stands as both an aspiration and a challenge. Moving becomes a metaphor for life's demand to hold seemingly opposite states: holding and releasing, rootedness and freedom.

This has been a dive into how to walk this world with grace, rooting ourselves in what we carry and floating upward with what we release.