🌒 Monday Meditation: On Poverty, or What We Cannot Unsee

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🌒 Monday Meditation: On Poverty, or What We Cannot Unsee

Dear Becoming Ones:

Today, I sat down to write this meditation

and what came to me -

uninvited, insistent -

was poverty.

Not as abstraction.

Not as statistic.

But as atmosphere.

A weather system.

The kind Christina Sharpe names when she says

we are living in the wake -

where catastrophe is not an event,

but an ongoing condition.

I cannot unsee it.

A full-on class war unfolding in plain sight.

And here I am, carried - no, pushed -

to the margins of the margins,

where they say life is teeming

but what I see

is what scholars call persistent poverty:

chronic stress,

premature death,

and the quiet consolidation of power

through institutional affiliation.

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🕯️ Poverty as Indictment

A meditation on poverty

is not gentle work.

It indicts.

It indicts the owning class -

those who have learned how to fold themselves

into supremacy culture

through property, proximity, and protection.

And it indicts the Institutional Church -

which has stored its treasures in buildings

while bodies go unhoused,

which has called accumulation “stewardship”

while calling survival “lack of faith.”

Poverty is not accidental.

It is engineered.

Maintained.

Blessed, even.

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🌾 Poverty as Practice

And still -

poverty is also a teacher.

A brutal one.

Poverty is a persistent struggle -

the kind that demands:

• consistency

• control

• commitment

Not the polished kind sold in self-help books,

but the kind you learn

when there is no safety net beneath you.

The kind that teaches you

how to make a way out of no way.

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🔥 Poverty and Choice

Perhaps a meditation on poverty

is also a meditation on choice.

Because many do not have one.

We do not choose where we are born.

We do not choose the conditions that shape us

before we even have language.

And yet -

there comes a moment,

quiet, trembling,

where we begin to ask:

What is mine to choose now?

In September 2025,

I took what Søren Kierkegaard might call

a leap of faith -

and stepped into the dark forest.

Alone,

but not entirely.

I began attending ACA meetings.

Not because I had it all figured out,

but because something in me knew

I could not continue as I was.

My therapist had suggested it before.

It took time for the suggestion to become

possible.

And when it did -

I followed it.

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🌿 The Dark Forest is Not Empty

There are more resources than we are told.

But access is uneven.

And knowing where to look

is its own kind of privilege.

Still -

there are companions.

My dear, sweet, queer Jewish comrade,

Evangeline -

a steady presence

as I learned how to walk

without a map.

What I am learning is this:

Even in the dark forest,

there are anchors.

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🎹 Poverty of the Spirit

Poverty is not only material.

I have been spiritually impoverished, too.

The academy -

for all its prestige -

starved something in me.

I did not know how to feed myself

the kind of nourishment

my inner life required.

Today,

I listened to Bill Evans

on repeat.

One song.

Peace Piece.

And something in me softened.

Not fixed.

Not resolved.

But softened.

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🌫️ Psychic Poverty

What we call persistent poverty

is not only economic.

It is psychic.

Gloria Anzaldúa knew this.

So does Judith Butler.

There is a precarity shaping life right now -

a trembling edge

where survival and disappearance

feel too close together.

If we are not attentive

to meditations on poverty,

we will miss what is emerging.

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🌱 What Might Be Emerging?

Perhaps we need more meditations on poverty -

not to romanticize it,

but to recognize it.

To become fluent

in what it actually is.

Because without that fluency,

we mistake symptoms for causes.

We inherit analyses

that serve the owning class.

We call hierarchy “order”

and extraction “success.”

Here, in Allegany County,

class analysis is thin -

or captured.

And so the question remains:

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✨ Could We Imagine Otherwise?

Could we begin -

even here -

to imagine another way?

A way not organized

by scarcity and hoarding,

but by relation and repair.

A way where survival

is not a solitary act,

but a shared practice.

A way where poverty

no longer names

a life sentence -

but a condition we have learned

to dismantle, together.

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🕊️ A Gentle Practice for Today

Today, I invite you:

• Notice where poverty shows up - in body, in spirit, in community

• Name one place where you have been told you have no choice

• Ask gently: What is still possible here?

And if nothing feels possible -

stay there.

Breathe there.

Let that, too, be part of the meditation.

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With you in the struggle,

and in the slow work of becoming,

Roberto+

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