When you sit and you council for the welfare of the people,
think not of yourself or your family or even your generation.
Make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming.
—THE GREAT PEACEMAKER OF THE HAUDENOSAUNEE, TWELFTH CENTURY, QUOTED BY OREN LYONS, ONONDAGA COUNCIL OF CHIEFS
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I used the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
—JAMES BALDWIN, THE FIRE NEXT TIME
If all public policy was created in the spirit of love,
we would not have to worry
about unemployment, homelessness,
schools failing to teach children, or addiction.
—BELL HOOKS, ALL ABOUT LOVE
In chapter 3, I brought you into the numerics of lovelessness. I showed the astronomical rates of families reporting food insecurity and emotional neglect, where 56 percent of the people who reported the most severe form of food insecurity said “yes” in response to this question: “Did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special?” This was almost three times the rate of affirmative responses that people who were food secure reported. The rampant alienation, isolation, and neglect of our children and each other is ripping us apart. Exacerbating this isolation and separation are the current social, economic, and political systems in the United States.
Many cultural commentators and political scientists, including bell hooks, insist that alienation and isolation are upheld by a culture of fear and domination. Love without domination—love that is rooted in care, respect, responsibility, and affection—promotes feelings of belonging. “When we choose to love we choose to move against fear,” says hooks. “Against alienation and separation the choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in each other.”1
In the studies we did on food insecurity and trauma, we found that lovelessness traveled from generation to generation. In previous chapters, I also demonstrated how we are still reeling from the experiences and actions of people we did not know many generations back in time. Those harms still flow in our blood.
There is a lot of hope, though. Sherita Mouzon, a former member of Witnesses and current staff member of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, spoke to the press about her view of how it is that people in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty have shorter life spans than people in wealthier neighborhoods. She said it comes as no surprise. “But,” she explained, “I always tell my daughter, it’s not where you’re from, but where you’re going.”2
We should heed Mouzon’s wisdom. We can all break that chain.
No matter what our circumstances, we have choice in how we respond to our circumstances and how we treat each other. We have the opportunity to do this in our personal lives. As well, those of us who are writing policy, and those of us calling the shots with nonprofits, small businesses, and big corporations, can muster the courage to talk about love and put love at the center of how we make decisions, write policies, and relate to each other.
Every decision we make affects people around us and multiple generations ahead. We ought to listen to the teachings of the Great Peacekeeper who gifted the Haudenosaunee people with the concept of making decisions not just for the people of today but also for the seventh generation to come—our grandchildren’s grandchildren. The way we work to address the gaping holes in our past creates a portal to our future. Our ideas and actions reverberate through time. How we are living, creating, and working today can send discrimination and despair into the future, or we can send forward strength, care, love, resilience, and nourishment.
Humans have a powerful ability to teach each other how to survive throughout the generations. Our ancestors leave tracks, concepts, ideas, instructions, and prophesies. Prophesies are warnings about the future, and they instruct us on how to live today. The Haudenosaunee people or the Onkwehonwe (Real People) have another prophesy: there will be a time when people mistreat their children and when the winds will accelerate. Oren Lyons explains how this is a comment on both the natural world and the human population. Harking to his people throughout the generations, he says that “we’re told that the only way to [change] this is to be respectful in your conduct.”3
But consider our circumstances. In the United States, a child is abused or neglected every forty-seven seconds, and one in five children lives in poverty.4 Extreme weather events such as hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires, and high winds are everywhere across the earth, including the United States.
Many people our team has worked with over the years have explained to us that they love so many people. They express loving-kindness for their friends but fail to show that same kindness to themselves. But the capacity to love another person depends on the capacity to love ourselves. People who have a hard time loving themselves may not have received love in ways that make them feel whole, safe, celebrated, and free. This is why low self-esteem—the kinds that Faith, Joanna, or those who want to hurt or kill themselves exhibit—is extremely worrisome.
A few weeks ago, we had a retreat at our center to check on the success of our effectiveness, refine our goals, and check in on each other. One staff member had us go through an exercise as a feelings check. She gave us paper and said, “Draw on your piece of paper how you feel.” We did that. Then she said,
OK, flip over the paper,
and draw how you really feel.
’Cuz even in a caring work environment like this,
you may not want people to know
or see how you are really feeling
deep down inside.
She also referenced that some people, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, or people who have mental illness or another disability, refuse to express emotion because it may put them in harm’s way; they may lose their job, lose face, be ridiculed, or invite some other type of trouble.5
Having worked with a healing-centered framework, our workplace can occasionally broach emotional depths with deep self-awareness. We were talking about this complexity as a group. A former Network member who coaches new members explained that she often tells people she is fine. She is easy to laugh and express love and appreciation for others. She said she drew a happy and peaceful face on the front side of the paper. But when she was prompted to flip over the paper and draw how she felt underneath that surface emotion, she drew an anxious face and then acknowledged how deep this emotion went. She said that her mother never expressed love for her. In fact, she was always told she was “no good.” She noted it makes it hard for her to not only love herself but also trust and love others. “If my own mother could do that to me,” she said, “what’s to say someone else won’t also hurt me? This is why I trust no one with my emotions.” Several other staff who had been in either the Network or Witnesses agreed. The staffer who was leading the exercise agreed,
That is the deepest pain,
to not have a mother’s love.
But the women who went so deep into that discussion agreed how it is possible to heal their emotional pain. They are breaking the chain, finding ways to love themselves and others, share their joy with others, and work hard to ensure that their own children never feel such a gaping hole in the soul. The Network is a program that has helped bring this forth.
Even if we are not in the Network, however, we can tap in to many types of practices that expand our circle of love. One of the first steps to take is to slow down long enough to look into and understand what’s in the “hole” for ourselves. Remember, I described a similar hole in chapter 9 that my mother was afraid to slow down enough to look into and deal with her grief. Sometimes, that hole is due to feelings of being misunderstood and mistreated—as if we do not belong to the world, our family, friends, and community and, by extension, ourselves. It takes practice, stamina, and courage to be resilient enough to withstand the pull of the darkness there.
Buddhist teachings make it clear that much of the world’s suffering is rooted in our inability to recognize and heal our wounds. There is a teaching from the Buddha’s perspective on how to transform violence that speaks to this directly:
The whole world is burning with violence.… I have looked deeply into the minds of those who are not happy, and I have seen hidden under their suffering a sharp-pointed knife. Because they cannot see the sharp-pointed knife hidden in their mind, they are not able to bear the pain.… The pain brought about by the sharp-pointed knife lasts a long time without changing. People hold on to that knife wherever they go, so that their pain spills out into the world. Only when they have a chance to recognize the knife and take it out of their hearts, will their suffering cease, and they will have a chance to stop running.6
When I think of my mother and her fear of looking within, I sense that she knew the knife was there in the gaping hole she described, but she was unable to pull it out. Part of that was due to a lack of love for herself that would allow her to hold herself steady. So she just kept running.
A well-known Buddhist practice to help magnify love for self and others is called metta meditation, meaning “loving-kindness” meditation. If we can feel love for our children, lover, or dear friend, then of course we have that capability to love all people, including ourselves. Here is a practice I can share with you. Metta meditation is usually done during a time of being still and quiet, when you can focus on your breathing and feel your own warmth. The structure of such meditation typically begins with yourself and expands outward. You begin by making a quiet proclamation such as
May I be happy,
may I be loved,
may I be healed,
may I be free.
Then you repeat the same loving-kindness stretching outward to people you feel close to. You say, “May you be happy, may you be loved, …” and so on. Then you expand the circle of love to people you do not know so well. From there, you send love to people you dislike, and then even to those who have caused you harm. Metta meditations are widely known across the globe, and scientists have found that this practice has profoundly positive effects on emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.7
Metta is only a small part of a much broader logic of love known in Buddhist traditions. Thich Nhat Hahn has described four domains of love: Loving-kindness, the desire to offer deep listening and understanding while loving everyone, regardless of who they are; compassion, the desire to reduce and remove suffering in oneself and others; joy, the ability to bring joy and release to those around you; and equanimity, to love and treat everyone without discrimination.8 Buddhist philosophy and practices reach back in time over twenty-six hundred years. Of course, many cultures have similar traditions, but I can only speak to what I’ve learned over the past few decades of meditation and comradery with people who practice in the Plum Village tradition of Zen Buddhism. A seed of this love practice came from Siddhartha Gautama, or Buddha (the Awakened One), who was sitting under a bodhi tree for many months before he came to the wisdom that founded Buddhism, which branched out through many cultural traditions across the world. The teachings the Buddha passed on came from deep meditation as well as listening to and observing the trees around him. If you remember the previous chapter, where I make it clear that trees and all plant life have much to teach humans, you might recognize this potential for you, yourself, to tap into this ancient and broad wisdom that stems from the natural world.
Loving-kindness is rooted in the capacity to understand another person. We don’t even have to express this in person, by email or text, or through social media. We can simply experience this in our hearts and minds. We can feel and send love to people in the way we choose to think, feel, and be. Most of us already do this to some extent. Some of us may be thinking about a loved one faraway; perhaps they are on a trip on the other side of the globe, just in the next room, or getting ready to pick us up from school or work. We wait with great anticipation at seeing them. Or someone we love can be long deceased and we can still feel a deep sense of love, affection, and longing. Personally, I can even feel and send love for grandchildren I don’t have. There seems to be no limits for how broadly and far we can send loving-kindness.
Compassion is a concept known to most of us, regardless of our spiritual tradition. Many equate compassion with empathy, an ability to feel what another person is feeling (like putting yourself in Maria’s pink sneakers as she goes to the ATM machine and, in your heart or mind’s eye, attempting to feel what she felt before the father of her kids broke her ribs and stole her money). But it goes beyond that. Over the centuries, many teachers have sought out ways to teach the wisdom of compassion. Patrul Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher from the nineteenth century, taught people to imagine themselves in the place of others who are in torment—someone about to be murdered or a child who feels unloved. I’d say, remember chapter 1 and think of Juleen in the barrel, where even the nothing she had was falling apart, and her nerves were jumping in orange, green, and yellow, or chapter 10, where it became clear that the barrel was the ship.
Try to get into that barrel. Try to breathe.
If you can’t get there, consider this. Patrul Rinpoche asked people to imagine themselves as a mother with no arms whose baby has fallen into a raging river and can do nothing about it. The torment there may be enough to arouse compassion. Yet Buddhist Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed on from this world in January 2021, explained that compassion is not just to imagine oneself in another’s place but rather the ability to understand that suffering, and then be able to remove pain or transform a person’s pain. So let’s stick with that image of an armless woman at the edge of the river. Feel her pain and grief? Got arms? Can you swim? Do you have courage? Then dive in, save the baby, and bring them back to their mother’s lap. Then keep them company while you both grieve for all that could have been lost. That is care in the wake.
Removing pain can also mean you can be a kind friend with an open heart who listens deeply as a friend needs to express themselves. Or you can be a doctor, nurse, physician’s assistant, therapist, social worker, or spiritual healer who heals pain. In broader ways, this can be helping and healing people through being a legislator who writes policy to improve our political and economic systems of care that help millions of people at a time. Collectively and politically, removal of pain can also take the form of reparations and decolonization.
Let’s return to the outset of chapter 10 and consider the image Malcolm X described regarding the nine-inch knife of racially motivated harm. Pulling it out only a little will not help. One must work to remove the entire knife and heal the wound. To do so, one must recognize the knife is there. Consider the mirror image of the spiritual work necessary to pull out the dagger of pain in our own hearts. Both acts of removing pain, politically and spiritually, are interdependent. They are a mirror reflection of what we are called to do.
The other two forms of love—joy and equanimity—also deserve deep attention.
My mother’s last summer was 2010, before she died of colon cancer. Her face was ashen from strain and struggle, and not being able to eat. She seemed angry all the time.
Her daily complaint: “Why don’t people smile more?”
I viewed her obsession with smiling as a form of oppression. We always had to show eagerness and happiness around her, ever since I could remember. “Stay cheery! Even when you are sad or disappointed.” This pressure was a threat. “Laugh and smile, or else!”
On a rainy summer afternoon in 2010, I took my kids for an outing to get away from the emotional storm clouds over the house. I was mad at my mother. I knew she was down, but I was also angry that my children and I were expected to smile on command—not when we were genuinely happy. I was feeling the weight of her suffering; my kids were too.
We walked into a T-shirt shop that sold books as well. While my kids were distracted by the T-shirts, I picked up the book Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh and read the first few paragraphs:
Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, such as the blue sky, the sunshine, and the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and all around us, everywhere, anytime.
If we are not happy, if we are not peaceful, we can’t share peace and happiness with others, even those we love.… If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.9
Tears of shame welled up as I thought of my mother. Of course my mother needs us to smile. She is desperate to experience joy. She cannot find it in herself; she needs joy reflected back to her so she can feel well. I felt that I had begun to experience my own sense of peace and happiness, and I thought that she was ruining it. But I had it backward. I was causing harm by not sharing some of my inner peace with my mother. Recognizing how I can help mirror a sense of peace, healing, and joy, I came home smiling, and have been genuinely smiling more to my kids and everyone around me ever since.
Members of Witnesses also needed more healing, joy, and liberation. Yes, they expressed a lot of grief and sadness; yes, they wanted justice. But most of the time justice was far beyond the horizon, as a distant promise that was losing luster. What lifted Faith, Sarafina, Carla, and Joanna’s spirits was everyday kindness, care, respect, and joy.
In the absence of money and lack of access to effective policy levers that could increase SNAP and wages, family leave, reparations, and free college education, what could I give? Joy and a sense of ease, peace, and happiness. I started decorating the offices with more joyous colors. We brought in stuffed animals for everyone’s kids. We started laughing more and finding ways to help people join in. We focused less on trauma and injustice and began lending more energy to joy, play, fun, dancing, healing, and love. This is the joyous siblinghood we also brought into the healing-centered practices of the Building Wealth and Health Network. The Network became a place of loving friendships. “Loving friendships,” hooks states, “provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with difference and conflict while staying connected.”10
It’s been twenty-two years since I met Juleen, fifteen years since the start of Witnesses to Hunger, twelve years since my mother died, ten years since the start of the Network, and almost seven years since we opened the EAT Café. Through these challenges and projects, I was given the opportunity to build up stamina for unsettling discomfort and pain by generating joy. Suffering is infinite. So must be our joy and sense of happiness to heal it. If the suffering has the energy of a hurricane or tornado, let your love and joy be of equal energy to meet it.
The fourth dimension is equanimity—love without discrimination. This means one cannot decide to love someone based on their behavior, the color of their skin, how much money they have, their gender expression, or their zip code. Hence if a person is addicted to drugs, has hurt someone, or behaves and looks differently than you, you can still offer love with respect and dignity.
This is the deepest and most challenging form of love. It is a form of love that has never been developed on any grand scale in the United States. Lack of equanimity is discrimination. As an antidote to discrimination, equanimity can set new ground from which to heal the pain of not having enough food.
Consider that, if US policies to support people who are poor were rooted in an ethic of love as equanimity, solutions to hunger would be crystal clear: reparations, rematriation, UBI, universal health care, universal childcare, no prisons or police, mutual aid, and the right to food for everyone without the charade of judging someone’s worth.
Our relationships with food can be complex, as they have much to do with our social lives, our perceptions and sensations in our body, where we live, our cultural and spiritual traditions, how much money and time we have, our emotional states, and so much more.
But I want to draw attention to lack of respect for food itself. Remember Akomolafe’s depiction of the slave ship. The food was underneath all the humans. Many people view food as a thing, as a simple commodity that can be grown, bought, and sold without consequences or repercussions. How we grow food, care for it, and nurture it should be reflected in the respect for how the food nourishes and cares for us. We are in a mutual relationship. After all, we have a deep intimacy with food as we put it into our mouths, taste it, and swallow it; we invite it into our bodies and expect it to nourish us. Why wouldn’t we show food our gratitude and respect?
The way we grow, harvest, sell, buy, and consume food in the United States seems incommensurate with the generosity of plants. Kimmerer wrote about how large and industrial farms plant corn in row after row—as if the corn is part of a military, or worse, as Kimmerer suggests, the corn is “enslaved” to the farmer.11 The way food is planted, grown, harvested, or gathered is always in a hurry. Migrant farmworkers (many of whom are undocumented and food insecure) have to race the clock in double time because they are only paid by the piece. The same is true for the meatpacking industry. The line for butchering gets faster and more dangerous. Industrial poultry farms shove growth hormones down the throats of chickens and crowd and cage them in giant warehouses without light so they grow faster, and thus we can butcher them faster, wrap them in plastic, and shape them into nuggets for school lunch—for a fee. People love to watch cooking shows where other people run around a grocery store and quickly gather their ingredients, and then they cook meals with speed on time just to get judged and kicked to the side if it’s not good enough. The speed matches our greed, and we find this entertaining.
We forget that food is a gift.
Take some time.
Imagine our food talking to us as the plants who are defending their own rights in the face of human onslaught and disrespect.
Millions of people are now losing access to arable land and potable water; tens of millions of climate refugees are leaving their homelands due to the climate catastrophe, war, and tyranny. As a species, humans are in a massive, collective upheaval. If we do not stem the dangers of global warming and begin to heal our relationships and demand equality for all people, many more millions of people will fall victim to military or private militias that will use violent tactics including murder to control food and water. This is already happening. Now that avocados are considered a “superfood” and avocado toast is so popular in the United States, Mexican cartels guard avocado farms with machine guns, while the local communities in the area are losing access to their water because avocado farmers, under protection at gunpoint, are diverting it from non-avocado farms to make a profit.12
In the same way we need to heal our relationships with our human family and ourselves, we should engage in more meaningful relationships with plants, animals, soil, water, air, and ecosystems.
Before eating their meal, the monastics and lay community members in the Plum Village tradition recite or listen to the contemplation below. It is an opportunity to slow down to appreciate life and the world around us. It is a meditation on our interconnectedness, our interbeing. It honors our food as a form of self-care and of repairing the world.
Note this concept of gratitude: “so as to be worthy to receive this food.” This is not related to the other kind of worthiness on which I previously focused where humans exclude people because they are either poor or not poor enough. Rather, in this framework, to be worthy of our food is to ask ourselves if we are humble enough, and if we have the appropriate respect for our food, land, water, air, soil, and each other. It is a demonstration that we belong to our food and to each other.
The ways that many of us eat—burgers from the drive-through and juicy steaks at the roadside pit stop—are contributing to the sixth great extinction. Agriculture and food production are responsible for about one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.14 The warming of the planet has already surpassed most of its tipping points for sustaining much of life on earth. All living beings—inclusive of trees and shrubs—are trying to migrate to the poles to get to cooler lands and waters. But the food chain along with the food systems on land and water are already depleted—in many cases, in ways beyond repair.15
Most of us know this—kids in second grade as well as young and middle-aged adults; even our elders know. But the disrespect continues in our carelessness, hoarding, and waste. One can see the disrespect in the encouragement of throwing a pie in the elementary school principal’s face as I highlighted in chapter 8, as a sign of childish victory encouraged by Feeding America if our kids collect record-breaking pounds of food in the form of beef chunks and peanut butter.
If we cannot respect our food, how can we respect all plants, animals, soils, minerals, and waterways? How can we respect our fellow human beings, and how can we have any respect for ourselves? Hunger flourishes in this environment of disrespect.
But we can flip this with equanimity, joy, compassion, and understanding to bring us into right relationship with the planet, each other, and ourselves.
We tried to do this with the EAT Café. We set up the right pay structure and a culture of no judgment. We were trying to stand tall against the winds of capitalism. Even though some people who came to the café were wealthy and could pay triple the amount to supplement other people’s meals, many people seemed to go there just to get a good deal. They liked the feeling of participating in something meaningful but neglected to pay the true price.
I will never forget the people who came to the café for food, music, joy, and fellowship, especially one mother of three young children who came in winter 2017. She told the server how grateful she was to have warm food and be in a warm place, as they had been living without water and heat all winter. When the server brought hot chocolate for her and each of the children without anybody asking for it, she was beside herself with tears of grief and gratitude. Loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity were there. It was meant to be a place of belonging. We were trying to create a place of love and care, and do it through food and companionship. Hot chocolate helps too.
“When we are self-loving,” hooks stated, “we attend to the deeper needs of our soul, we no longer feel abandonment or loss of recognition.”16 This self-love is necessary to help plug in to larger networks of solidarity.
We sought to help grow solidarity and love in the programs of Witnesses, the Building Wealth and Health Network, and EAT Café. In the early years of Witnesses, people would ask me, “What’s the most challenging thing you have learned from members of Witnesses?” When it felt safe enough to do so, which was never in a public forum, I explained that I was ill prepared for the depths of despair and lack of self-esteem. I could understand how policy interventions could help with income poverty, such as increased wages, housing subsidies for safe and affordable housing, more SNAP benefits and nutrition supports, and laws that ensure equal pay for women. But for the low self-esteem as a result of rape, disrespect, abandonment, or as Treva Lindsey puts it, “unlivable living,” I had little idea what to say—I suppose because it would take over two hundred pages of a book to get across the necessary depth of response.17 I couldn’t bear all this pain that people were sharing with me. I could not find a way to articulate its depths. I needed witnesses or bystanders to acknowledge the pain and hold it with me long enough for me to find a way to give it voice. You, dear reader, are witness to this. And by witnessing the pain herein, you are making a way for the healing to come through.
No amount of intellectual thought or “systems change” strategies in the current national policymaking arena can reach the depths of the emotional and spiritual challenges associated with racial trauma, gender-based violence, and child abuse, and with the reflection of all three of these in the violence in our political, cultural, and economic systems. As I listened to the women I interviewed and worked with over the years, their experiences tapped into a suffering that I did not even know was inside me. They forced me to reckon with hundreds of years of history in the space of a single conversation. I had to expand my heart and deepen my humanity. Larry Ward, a Zen Buddhist and spiritual teacher, asserts that in refusing to address racialized trauma and the devastation of hundreds of years, many people in America “are in sociological despair, meaning we are as a nation out of alignment with our depth of humanity.”18
What was a person to do to help Joanna feel, deep inside, that she was worth more than one pot, other than constant reassurance, consistent presence, opportunities to speak to legislators as well as be interviewed on the radio and newspaper, and, as I wanted so much, to simply be her friend? Faith, the member of Witnesses whom we had to hospitalize to protect her from killing herself in her laundry room, explained the lack of self-love in a stark way. “I cannot love myself,” she remarked when we first met. “I can’t even find myself to love.”
I told her, “Faith, you are so brilliant and you are beautiful and you are such an inspiration to me. Don’t you see that?”
She replied,
Mariana, when I look in the mirror,
I literally cannot see myself.
I don’t see anything.
I see nothing.
After several years of traveling to Washington, DC, and other places for multiple exhibits and panel functions, Faith and I did a local Philadelphia radio interview about poverty in Philadelphia. She reflected on her relationships with members of Witnesses and the social action in which they participated. “Not until I started doing Witnesses did I feel like I mattered, that people listened. I can see myself now. When I look in the mirror, I see a beautiful woman.” Being able to see herself in the mirror was a long, hard struggle that came through developing and acting on feelings of belonging, community care, and joy where she could become involved in struggles beyond herself. In this process, she could begin to see her reflection.
Such a profound gap in the soul is a deeply personal experience. It is also clearly reflected in how US society views Black women and families. Most members of Witnesses understood that this was not simply an experience deep in the body and spirit but instead a reflection of their neighborhoods and communities along with the death-dealing systems of our government and society.
Esther took a photo of trash in the stairwell. She said, “As you go by these abandoned houses in the neighborhood and you see all the trash in the street, you realize no one cares about us, no one cares about me and my children. So then I stop caring about anything.” One of her self-portraits was of her face, with tears streaming down both cheeks.
The ongoing disrespect, neglect, and abandonment of primarily Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia is seen in the numerous abandoned factories, boarded-up homes, weeks of uncollected trash in the street, abandoned community centers with fences and barbed wire around them, and more. This is a fractal, again, of what is felt in the body and soul.
Some people may want to say that doing personal work and loving oneself is the wrong focus; it should be protesting against the violent structures in place and taking action to create new ones. I insist, however, that they are one and the same. As I explained in chapter 3, the body keeps the score of traumatic events, just as our social bodies keep the score of ongoing policy and historical violence. The inner and outer are porous and always influence and reflect each other.
So when you see factories abandoned for over forty years, windows broken out, trash in the street, or abandoned homes with caved-in roofs, how can you not read state-sponsored disrespect, abuse, and lovelessness? Bad policy is a form of violence that causes these abuses and abandonments.
After a talk I gave in a Philadelphia church in 2018 about hunger, homelessness, trauma, despair, and how to change it, a white woman from the audience who is at the helm of one of the most powerful philanthropic organizations in the region reprimanded me privately as we stood among the church pews. She said, “You should support the mayor and local leaders. You criticizing the city government takes away from the good they can and will do.” But she missed the point. I was talking about the long history of subjugation. I was inviting people to not get complacent just because we have supposedly thoughtful people in charge. I took the long view, deep into the past and far into the future. With our current structures and ways of being, Philadelphia’s abandoned factories, neglected streets, dilapidated and unlivable houses, poor health, and household food insecurity simply endure and continue.
After twenty-five years of doing policy-relevant work on hunger, I have little confidence in our current systems. I see how they destroy and abuse. I see no widespread, universal loving-kindness. Rather, I see favoritism for wealthy, white, and powerful people, such as medical, legal, and business professionals, through the billions of dollars invested in Philadelphia center city offices, supplemented by tax breaks that allow for the neglect and disinvestment in schools, neighborhood community centers, libraries, and more. The investments of wealth continue to be directed toward the wealthy who exploit people and keep them impoverished.
Something must change. What’s that? Everything.
Becoming a loving, more inclusive person is what you and I can do immediately. We owe it to the people around us and those who come after us to spread more love—more kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. We also owe it to our more-than-human kin to stop the exploitation and domination. Circling back to what I said at the end of my introduction, I suggest we take our cue from Audre Lorde and make a conscious decision to lean into love with a depth of feeling. It helps us step into our power. This power brings together the personal, political, and spiritual. Lorde said that it is not a “question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.… The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.”19
Juleen, Joanna, Maria, Celeste, Remi, Faith, Carla, Sarafina, Esther, Sherita, and so many other people who have inspired this book have the courage to speak up and demand transformative change without hesitation, without fear, and full of love for the world and future generations. If you have read this far, I sense you have that fearlessness and love too. Please join in. You are needed for the end of times.
Give yourself some space to evolve and remember that you already know how to end hunger in the United States and around the world. Nothing holds us back from taking action to heal the violences in our past and present. To do so requires us first and foremost to see, hear, acknowledge, and courageously respond to the painful truth expressed by people who know hunger in their gut. From there, we know that if we respond with love and respect in our personal lives, our political work, and our spiritual practice, we can greet the trouble ahead with courage and joy to create a more nourishing world.
1. bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018), 6.
2. Rita Giordano, “Where Do You Live? It May Give Clues to How Old You’ll Grow, Federal Data Suggest,” Philadelphia Inquirer, accessed April 8, 2022, https://
3. Tree Media, “Oren Lyons on the Indigenous View of the World,” YouTube, September 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbwSwUMNyPU.
4. “Child Abuse Statistics,” Children’s Advocacy Centers of Tennessee, n.d., http://
5. Shawn Ginwright, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022).
6. Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Art of Transforming Suffering,” Mindfulness Bell, no. 88 (Autumn 2021): 20.
7. Xianglong Zeng et al., “The Effect of Loving-Kindness Meditation on Positive Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (November 3, 2015): 1693, https://
8. Tree Media, “Oren Lyons on the Indigenous View of the World.”
9. Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2005).
10. hooks, All about Love, 133–134.
11. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Emergence Magazine, accessed October 14, 2022, https://
12. bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2002).
13. “New Contemplations before Eating,” Plum Village, January 15, 2014, https://
14. “Food Production Is Responsible for One-Quarter of the World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Our World in Data, accessed May 2, 2023, https://
15. Duncan Williamson, Kate Munro, and Monica Carlotti, “Climate Change: A Hunger Crisis in the Making,” ReliefWeb, October 26, 2021, https://
16. hooks, Communion, 139.
17. Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).
18. Quoted in Kimmerer, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System.”
19. Audre, Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, rep. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 89.