Neuroscientists now tell us that for the most part
we see what we expect to see,
unaware of mental frames that filter, organize, and give meaning to our world.
There is, therefore, no task more important for survival -
our own and that of other species - than to understand the frames
through which we see the world, to investigate whether they are, in fact, life-serving,
and then to make needed adjustments.

by Frances Moore Lappe
from an article, Natural Abundance,
in January 2008 issue of Shambala Sun

I

Tuco turns to the article again, enthralled.
"What I had uncovered was correct:
Humans had created an economic system that was actually shrinking
the earth's capacity to feed us, now and in the future.
I called it a protein-factory in reverse."
Ms Lappe had earlier stated, that while they were saying life boat earth couldn't feed us,
"But in my own modest, follow-my-nose research,
I was uncovering something very different: that there was more than enough food
in the world to make our entire species chubby. And that's still true today.
We humans cannot blame nature for rampant hunger."

Later she writes of David R. Loy's book, A Buddhist History of the West.
In particular about the intention behind his subtitle - Studies in Lack.
"Our sense of self is a construct and to be self-conscious is to
experience our ungroundedness as a sense of lack."
We then objectify our lack into impersonal institutions.
And the loss of means to explore the meaning of our lives
becomes a felt 'not yet enough' that can never be enough.

Tuco felt it was sound, but over his head.
But he had long understood how fear fed ego and grasping.
But there appears another path,
"As the meditation practice
that I learned from my Buddhist teachers
allowed me to fall in love with life,
I discovered that the prayer language of 'thank you'
that I knew from my childhood
returned, spontaneously and to my great delight."²

Yet, Tuco needs return to the lack at hand,
"We humans cannot blame nature for rampant hunger."
And how he might, in some small way, reduce the world's grasping
at straws. We find chaff³ when seeking grain.
And Tuco had learned that milled grain wasn't what fed him well.
Whole grain was the unfiltered kindness he knew. Less is lack.
Once more, this practice allowed him to fall in love with life.
And to share more fully.