Leonardo Boff: "Poverty is a way of being by which the individual lets things be what they are; one refuses to dominate them, subjugate them, and make them the objects of the will to power."
It demands "an immense asceticism of the renunciation of the instinct to power, to the domination over things, and to the satisfaction of human desires"
qt'd by Fanny Howe, 79
note that Howe says this is not about the absence of necessities -- this kind of poverty is "not erased by the necessities (food and housing) but is, ideally, sustained by them"
she also notes that The poor also means "the earth and all the creatures that live upon it, the always-with-us"