In Winnowing, Suzanne Matson examines our personal, cultural, and environmental relationship with material objects. Matson alternates between reflective essays on the nature of ownership and her own “Winnowing Log,” a day-by-day account of her attempts to reduce the items in her home. Sorting through the emotional value of mementos, the gendered dimensions of housekeeping, and the environmental cost of both mass production and disposal, she physically, mentally, and spiritually lightens her life while reflecting on the tethers that make winnowing so hard. She compares ideas of material impermanence in Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity, acknowledging that total renunciation of things is beyond most people’s goals or abilities, but also that reducing what we own, carry, and tend can clear space for spiritual lightness, aesthetic pleasure, and freedom. Rather than a celebration or condemnation of material goods, Winnowing is a meditation on the personal and universal struggles and rewards of separating the chaff from the grain.
