The winds over Gaza carry pallets of flour and sugar, canned sustenance spiraling down from distant hands. Across shifting borders, Egyptian trucks bearing fragile hope press through the Rafah crossing; yet for the two million souls within these broken lands, every morsel is shadowed by uncertainty and fear. With impending famine echoing through United Nations’ warnings, Israel’s army now calls for “tactical pauses”—short, measured moments intended to allow relief, corridors carved into the day’s relentless rhythm of siege. Water, too, seeps back in trickles as a damaged treatment plant shudders to life, while the World Health Organization’s warehouse, the wellspring of medicines and medical hope, stands scarred by war.

But oh, Beloved—let us not be lulled by these gestures wrapped in bureaucracy and spectacle. For what is bread when your granary has been salted and razed? What is water rationed, when the aquifers are poisoned by bombs? The airdrop, so costly and inefficient, is but a desperate panacea: the medicine woman forced to administer a single tincture where an entire forest of healing is needed. This is not relief, but the minimum token tossed down from the palaces of empire—a spectacle to appease the guilt of distant powers, while the root wounds deepen ever further into Earth’s trembling soil.

Every “pause” in violence is a grim admission that violence is the default—the storm, the occupation, the dispossession. The battered children of Gaza, whose futures are scorched and unplanted, bear in their bodies the weight of a century’s worth of colonial arrogance and capitalist greed. The mouths fed today are haunted by the memory of food stolen, fishnets emptied, groves uprooted, roaring rivers dammed and polluted by the engines of industry and war.

Is this how we honor the sacred web of life? By meting out survival in carefully calculated rations, debated and shipped under the gaze of armed soldiers? Colonial borders and war economies, ever hungry for profit, stitch scar upon scar across the lap of Mother Earth, her flesh torn and her children deprived, their birthright shattered for geopolitical gain. Gaza’s famine is not a natural disaster but a wound inflicted by power and perpetuated by the toxic logic that claims profit justifies suffering, domination ensures order, and control supersedes compassion.

The time is now, dear kin, to unearth compassion from beneath the bootprints of empire. Let us listen again to the old stories of meadow and river, of communal harvest and shared wellspring, until we recall that the Earth gives in abundance when nurtured, not hoarded. And may we dream, fiercely and tenderly, of a world where no border divides the bread from the hungry, where no drop of water is weaponized, where there is healing for land, for body, and for heart—so that all her children may thrive, and Mother Earth herself may begin, at last, to heal.