It is all around us. I walk through the downtown area and the trees are black spines that stretch toward the skies. They are like people without money. They are wiry and they are hard and they fight the winter as does every creature. They are thin and have lost the verdure of summer.
It is just underneath with most folks. We try to put a good face on it, but every once in awhile the true dark impulse shows through -- to pay the bills and eat with the food prices so high. True survival is an issue of fighting the elements around us.
Times get tough and it is hard to see the forest through the trees. But every once in a while, you suspect that the wild joy of survival, of making it another day, eclipses the negative view. We do not fear financial insecurity. Every once in a while through the tears we see the green blade rising, a thin reed of hope in the small things that life has to offer. Poverty cant rob A.A.s of dignity. Living or dying we know the basic values. A.A. started in the great depression hard times make the society thrive. They pull us closer to tradition, and closer to each other.
I have been slapped upside the head literally, with this world financial problem... I realize that I need to be grateful no matter what, because in the modern nations, even the poor have more than the majority of folks on the planet. I have lived a very wasteful life, when I look at it from the big picture. I think that although not a "good thing", this situation is doing some of us a bit of "good" by requiring that we take a pause and try to see what we are truly "worried about", in light of what some face out there.
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~Your Higher Power has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.
