This talk exploring how gratitude can be the foundation for service and activism was first presented to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Glens Falls in Queensbury, New York, on November 30, 2025. The presentation was preceded by the Akwesasne Thanksgiving Address, read responsively with the congregation. Akwesasne is a Mohawk Nation staddling the U.S.-Canadian border in New York along the St. Lawrence River.
That reading was the Akwesasne version of the Mohawk Thanksgiving Address, a traditional prayer which, translated from Mohawk, is “the words that are spoken before all others.” It comes from a longer Mohawk and Haudenosaunee religious ceremony but has been adopted for more mundane business meetings and social gatherings. The Akwesasne recite it at both the start and end of meetings to encourage participants to work together for the good of all.
It serves as a mindfulness practice for living in harmony with nature. The spirit of the Thanksgiving Address can be felt throughout Akwesasne in how people live their lives, interact with each other, and conduct business. As we read together, maybe you were reminded of other beings and things you can be grateful for, expanding any thankfulness that arose in your celebration of Thanksgiving this past week.
Mindfulness and gratitude go hand in hand. I began with opening words by Anne Haven McDonnell, a poem which begins, “She said it softly.” But I didn’t share the title then, which is what she said. It is “She Told Me the Earth Loves Us.” “After everything?” the poem replies. The poem is about grieving a climate changed world, but also about mindfulness, learning again the wonders of the Earth, wonders the Mohawk are grateful for. The poem is found in the book, “All We Can Save,” a compilation of essays and poems about the climate crisis.
There’s an essay in the book about reciprocity, discussing how the cooperative-community theory of ecology was pushed aside for the now prevailing theory that everything is competing with or predating everything else. I’d like to think that science doesn’t follow politics, but the disappearance of the cooperative-community theory coincided with the start of the Cold War and anti-communist sentiment. But it didn’t disappear completely, because researchers testing competition kept coming up with unsatisfying results. I’m glad, because as more information comes out about how members of an ecosystem work together, perhaps we will start to see through the existing competitive market-driven economy that has extracted from and decimated those ecosystems and more towards an economic system based on mutual aid, reciprocity.
But back to gratitude for now. The Buddhist activist and teacher Joanna Macy shared that, before change or action, we should come from gratitude. The practice of gratitude, according to Macy, moves us into a state of presence with the wonder of being alive in this, let’s face it, amazing world. You awaken to gifts you receive, the beauty around you, and the mystery in it all. As you take time to notice what you have, you are grounded in trust, trust that you have enough. It also makes you mindful of what we are losing. It’s unsettling to face the harsh reality of what’s happening to our world and those we share it with, especially when you realize you are safe from the worst of what’s happening. Gratitude isn’t a release from pain; it’s a practice so you can be in it.
There’s a quote credited to Albert Einstein that goes, basically, we can’t solve the problems of this world at the same level of thinking that created them. So how do we change thinking? Author and American druid John Michael Greer, who often writes on environmental issues, points out that we see the problems, we know what they are, but we just keep throwing technology at them. We recycle, we make cars more fuel efficient or, now, electric, and many believe we just have to keep doing those kinds of things. But they aren’t solving the problems. They aren’t even slowing them down, really. Greer says, if we want to solve it, we have to do as Einstein said, we have to change our thinking. That’s inner dimension work, work on what he calls the “murky realm of nonrational factors.” It’s in there that gratitude practices work.
In 1977, delegates from the Haudenosaunee went to the UN Conference in Geneva and presented a statement called “Basic Call to Consciousness,” which included these lines: “The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the spirits which create and support Life. We give greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives – the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.”
We live in an industrialized country within a five-century old culture of extreme individualism, where self-made success is revered. Even for you and I, and others like us, aware of the harm being done in the name of that success, a major shift into a mindset of gratitude is difficult. To most, maybe even to you, staying in a state of gratitude may feel radical. What if, though, the paradigm shifted to one where radical gratitude was the norm? It’s hard to admit, especially when economic challenges have us desiring self-sufficiency, that, once you consider all the other beings you rely on, self-sufficiency is nothing but a myth, an impossible goal. The Haudenosaunee understood this.
In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the full Thanksgiving Address. She also writes about the gift economy which arises from gratitude. In a gift economy, everything you have is a gift from the Earth. She contrasts this to the producer/consumer economy we’re in. In the gift economy, you would not receive something from the Earth and then sell it. Instead, if it is given to you and you have more than you need, it should be given to others. Imagine that, as a result of your work, you got what you needed and passed on the rest to the community. And you received from others, so everyone had enough. Imagine that the land was a gift to all life and there was no private property. I’ll admit it’s hard to wrap my head around that. Maybe it is for you, too. That’s why we need that radical gratitude practice.
Kimmerer doesn’t stop there with the gift economy, though. Gifts are not free. Gifts create relationships, responsibilities. Gifts require reciprocity.
She does think, though, that we can shift human perspective and think of the world as a gift. “A species and culture,” she writes, “that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it.” Remind you of the Einstein quote? She goes on: “The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.”
A gift relationship with nature, a balance of give and take, acknowledges our dependence on what Kimmerer calls “natural increase.” Different species working together leads to the whole ecosystem doing better. The market economy, which centers humans, is not good for the natural world. Or humans. But, remember, it’s just the story we’re telling ourselves currently.
The wise Joanna Macy reminded us that, today, we breathe in oxygen from plants that died eons ago. We of course can’t give back to them, but we can pay it forward, flowing the giving and receiving through time. And we can practice gratitude. Gratitude builds resilience. When you are grateful for what was, and what is, you recognize that you are already in the flow of change. When change comes suddenly, or with drastic consequences, you can hold that gratitude to recover and adjust. And keep paying it forward.
Let’s be real. You and I are alive in a time of drastic consequences. Take a breath with that and let go of any fear or guilt that came up for you. Fear and guilt have not fixed our problems. Neither has politics or power. None of those are good motivators. But Macy asked us to come from gratitude because gratitude is a good motivator. Like Kimmerer said, gratitude recognizes gifts, and gifts create relationships and responsibilities. Reciprocity. Service.
“All We Can Save” begins with an epigraph, a quote from Adrienne Rich: “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” She was one of those who serve.
Indigenous American stories are full of trickster tales – and the trickster is usually coyote. These stories reflect their reverence for and appreciation of coyotes. When wolves and cougars filled the predator niche here, coyotes didn’t range to the east coast, so it wasn’t until Lewis and Clark went on their expedition at the beginning of the 1800s that European settlers encountered coyotes. And they’ve been trying to eradicate them ever since. They, and we, undo ecosystems by eradicating any species deemed threatening or a nuisance, overhunting game species, and introducing invasives. And whenever we have, we’ve undone interconnected relationships. I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I’ve already said that doesn’t work. Instead, I’m sharing because I learned some things about coyotes and started to appreciate their presence, to be grateful for it. So back in 2023, I wrote a letter to Governor Hochul in support of legislation banning wildlife killing contests. It was a small act of service to coyotes, often victims of those contests, a continuation of the eradication goal started back in Lewis and Clark’s day. And I celebrated when the governor signed it into law.
I’m sharing this as one example of the way gratitude can lead to service. I should note that I am also grateful for the privilege that gave me the time and means to research, write, and send my letter. Acknowledging privilege is hard, especially because it is, or includes, economic privilege that arises in the take-take-take system that I’d like to see collapse. But, as Joanna Macy reminds us, I can pay it forward. The letter was just one way for me. I’m inspired by others who have even greater means and privilege and are doing their part to serve.
I remember when the news showed Jane Fonda getting arrested while protesting outside the US Capitol in 2019. Hard to miss since it happened three times that year. Jane Fonda was born into privilege and then went on to become a successful actor. Throughout her life, she has used her name recognition and resources in activism, in service to several causes.
She was quite well known for opposing the Vietnam War and later apologizing for statements she made that alienated the soldiers fighting there. She supported the Black Panthers. She helped establish the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, which helped get a record number of female legislators elected in 1992. Fonda consistently supported feminist and LGBTQ+ causes and, what got her arrested, environmentalism and climate change mitigation.
Another example is Emma Watson, who became known when she played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, and put her privilege to use in support of feminism and humanitarianism, environmental justice, and climate change. She was the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and helped found Time’s Up UK, advocating against bullying and harassment in the film industry.
I’m sure you can think of others.
I don’t have that kind of privilege, but I can do something. You can, too. And you don’t have to be a front-line activist. There’s a great little book called “Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul” that lays out other ways to serve. Some of you are good at cultivating relationships and communities. Some of you create art, music, film, literature, photography that helps others to see and think differently, the kind of people whose work is in “All We Can Save.” Some of you are documenting injustices and losses as well as successes and saves. Some of you are leveraging the technology that harms in so many ways and figuring out how to use it to improve ecosystems, including the human part. Some of you teach, facilitate, strategize, research, and resource other activists. How you serve, though, isn’t as important as why you serve.
Joanna Macy calls gratitude a social emotion. It always takes us outside of ourselves and directs our goodwill towards others. Gratitude and reciprocity build trust and generosity, among our fellow humans and in the ecosystems we inhabit. Gratitude is both spiritual and practical. It keeps us in a state of mindfulness and cooperation, whether we are sitting together in church or ceremony, meeting at a conference table, digging in our gardens, or walking in the woods. If your gratitude practice has been a once a year on Thanksgiving thing, I invite you to start now and take it forward. The world needs you and I to engage with gratitude until we are thinking at a higher level.
And, in the spirit of reciprocity, may we find a way to service.