staying salty

It has been six months since I last had full time employment and my spirit sags as I work on my taxes.  Of course my spirit would sag just working on my taxes, but this year it serves to as salt in the wound.  What does that scripture say?  That we are salt of the earth?  That we shouldn't lose our saltiness?  I don't feel to salty some days if I think of salt as an irritant in the wound.  I'm trying to focus instead on the healing powers of salt.  Did you ever gargle with salt to heal a kanker sore?  I'm trying to focus on salt as a universal equalizer making salty people those who share values and exercise common sense, as in "salt of the earth".  Like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile un/underemployment is causing a syzemic shift in the ground beneath us and values are being tossed about and buried under the rubble of lives that we built with faith in our economic structures and systems.  The upheavel has levened us; we share a humbleness in our un/uneremployment whether we were executives, construction workers, teachers, whilte- or blue-collar workers.  The trouble, I think, is that we keep looking outside ourselves for the resources that are life giving.  Sure we need a shelter over our heads, food in our bellies and water to quench our thirst.  Those are things that sustain life.  We also need that multi-purpose saltiness to keep us from giving up on life, to keep us restructuring our value systems when they crumble, to keep us looking for our true and autherntic voice and then using it to create more life.  I know that a word of approval from my husband, an affirmation of my gifts from a colleague, an open door welcoming the things I volunteer helps me maintain my saltiness.  What does it for you?  How can you stay salty?