This sermon and related Sunday service was first offered on August 16, 2026 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Glens Falls in Queensbury, New York. It begins with a guided visualization and is easily adaptable for any audience.
Take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. Now close your eyes or if you’re not comfortable doing that, look down at the floor without straining to see anything in particular down there. Notice your breath as it is in this moment. Watch it as it flows in and flows out. Notice the thoughts that arise to distract you from your breath. Let them go and return to your breath.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
In the quiet space between the thoughts, imagine you’re walking up a big hill. You’re almost to the top. As you walk, notice what’s around you. Is this hill grassy and open, or is it treed. What plants are growing here? Are there any other beings around? Maybe you hear bird song or see one fly overhead. What does the sky look like? Maybe there are small critters scurrying around in the undergrowth. Notice as you walk, using any senses available to you.
You’re at the top of the hill now. Pause here, looking out at or sensing the landscape before you. What you are seeing or sensing is the Earth exactly as you’d want it to be. You might see a stretch of wilderness, or human dwellings, or both. Maybe they are divided, or maybe they are interspersed. How do you want it?
What animals and plants do you see? What species are thriving in your perfect world? What do the human settlements look like? Cities, towns, farmland, houses dotting the landscape? How are the humans powering their homes and businesses?
Notice if you start to wonder if you are making the right choices in what you’re imagining. Return to your breath for a moment. Your vision is exactly right. It may not be the same as someone else’s but there will be common ground. Return to the Earth you are imagining without censoring anything out of it. See the future you want to manifest in as many glorious details as you can.
Now take that vision and plant it in your memory, as if it was a beautiful tableau you saw just yesterday and knew you never wanted to forget it.
Come back to your breath now. Notice you are breathing in and breathing out.
Breathing in and breathing out, your body moving subtly with the breath, and you are sitting in this room. Open your eyes, or look up. Notice how you feel as you return to the mundane world, this world, which may be very different from the world you imagined, the world you remember as if it already existed.
No, this world has troubles. And although we all know it could be so much better, most days it seems like getting there is impossible. Lately it feels like we’re going in the totally wrong direction and any progress we made is being reversed.
Just for an example, let’s talk about the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973 by President Nixon. You might remember that guy. Republican, kind of shady. Groups, like the Sierra Club , the National Wildlife Federation, and Audubon, pushed for the and it passed with bipartisan support and also lots of public support. The law provided protections not just for the threatened species but for their habitats during a time when land was rapidly being developed. And it worked.
Bald eagles, Florida panthers, peregrine falcons, grizzly bears, and gray wolves all still exist in this country because of the Endangered Species Act. And gorgeous landscapes were also saved to support them.
Until this year. Just a few months ago, the current administration decided to reinterpret the law to mean that endangered species protections only apply to the animals themselves, not their habitats, so those areas that had been off-limits to oil companies and developers no longer were. They can march right in and get started on their projects. And that is a 50 plus year step backwards.
Sorry, I’m angry and sad about this. You might wonder how we’re ever going to come back from this. I mean, once those places are destroyed, they’re destroyed, right? Even if we turn things around in a couple of years, a lot of damage may have already been done.
I don’t know who was around in your vision of the Earth as you’d like it to be, but in my vision, there are grizzly bears and wolves and lots of frogs and, of course, turtles, even the little bog turtles whose homes they want to drain and the box turtles who need forests and streams, not another mall.
I don’t want to be too much of a downer, but this is where we are. It’s important, I think, to acknowledge it. But it’s equally important to hold onto the vision of a better world.
I’ll admit my logical brain is going yeah, yeah, yeah, you can dream of anything you want, but that doesn’t make it so. But I tell you, dreaming of a different future in this day and age is a radical act. It’s audacious. It might even be fringe. Welcome to the edge, my friends.
Ecological philosopher and author, David Abram, writes about a time when he lived in Bali because he was studying the indigenous people there, the Bali Aga, and their relationship to magic. Cool, right? What he discovered, though, was so much deeper. He started hanging out with the shamans, the healers. These medicine people all lived on the outskirts of their villages, the edge, where they acted as mediators between the humans and the more-than-human life that lived all around them. It was believed that the human illnesses and other troubles were caused by an out-of-balance condition in the ecosystem, and it was the shaman’s job to bring it back. Before any healing work, the shaman needed to find what was out-of-balance and what could be done to repair it, so he journeyed, meditated, whatever you want to call it. The shamans were just highly skilled at what you just did.
And that’s why I asked you to imagine a better world and remember your vision for it. It’s work on the outskirts, the edge. Think about the world you imagined and pick one thing, just one, that was different than what exists today. I know, so many things, but for now just pick one little thing.
Okay? Now think about what has to happen to change what is into what could be in a better world. Again, maybe lots of things, but think of one or two, like breaking a big goal down into action steps.
Got it? Now, I’m not telling you to run out and do those things today. What’s more important for right now is the process of situating yourself in the edge of things. And it’s not just about the animals going extinct, although that’s a big one for me. The edge is the margins, and there’s lots of humans being pushed to the margins right now. So, if the better world you saw was more human-focused than mine, that’s great, too. There’s still a place for you on the edges.
Alright, you’ve got your vision and you’ve identified something that needs to change to make at least one part of that vision a reality, and you’ve thought of one or two things that could help that change come about. It is so important, so important, for you to hang on to those even when things are going backwards. Because what you’re holding onto is hope.
My opening words from Joanna Macy’s book, Active Hope, talked about that, about focusing on what we desire and taking steps in that direction, no matter what the outcome is. I am certainly not going to stop advocating for habitat protections just because some rich guys are conspiring to wreck them. And I’m not the only one fighting for the beautiful, glorious biodiverse landscapes that are in my vision of a better world.
So, I look at my so-called gardens, currently being overrun with the sumac I planted a few years ago, a professional landscaper’s nightmare I’m sure, but I look at the sumac blooming for the first time and think about how much food and shelter those unruly bushes are going to provide to birds and small animals. And I know that no matter what else happens there is this little bit of land where native plants have been restored and, as long as I live here, this is protected habitat. Am I saving an endangered species? Probably not, but maybe there is an insect in there whose populations are collapsing like so many and he and his family will still be here because I let sumac grow wild on the hill in front of my house.
Maybe, but that’s not what’s as important as taking a step in the direction of my vision of a better world. Even if nobody else does what I did, which I know isn’t true just by the number of books about growing native plants out now, and Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park movement taking off. Even if nobody else does it, I am doing that thing that says to the spirit of the ecosystem that I’m paying attention and making this offering, here on the edge, and let’s fix this imbalance together so we can help the humans heal, too.
In my shamanic energy work trainings, I teach people how to access their own visions through a variety of means and then I teach them how to lead. That better world you imagined needs leaders to make it so. I’m not talking about politicians who equate leadership with power and money or the CEOs who pretend to inspire but are really just exploiting their workers and the Earth. The real leaders are on the edge, where we are, leading by doing, leading by figuring out what things have to happen to make the better world they imagine possible, connecting with others who are working on those same things, and taking, as Joanna Macy wrote, determined steps in that direction.
Maybe those leaders are you.