🌒 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.
🕯️ 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.
🌾 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.
🔥 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.
🌿 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.
🎹 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.
🌫️ 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.
🌱 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:
✨ 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.
🕊️ 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.
With you in the struggle,
and in the slow work of becoming,
Roberto+