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activism
What Astrophysics Has Taught Me About Changing the World
Meaningful impact need not be bold and flashy. Our small, everyday choices seed change.
May 30, 2026
Today, like yesterday, I wake up and decide to make the world a better place.
I know, I know. There are over 8 billion people living on Earth. There are more places than any one of us will ever see, and more cultures than we will ever understand. How could a single person make an impact? How could a single person change the world for the better?
Many people would say it’s impossible. And at barely 5’2”, I’m glaringly aware of my literal smallness. As an astrophysicist, I know that I take up only about 10-83 times the volume of the observable Universe: a number so small I can’t wrap my head around it. The closest comparison I can muster is that I’m about the size of an atom in the scale of the solar system. And even then, I’d still be a bit smaller.
But none of that matters. My goal is still entirely within reach. That’s something that astrophysics has also taught me: small forces can make big changes.
The proof is under our feet. Today, Earth returns to the point in the solar system where it landed 365.24 days—almost, but not quite. Almost imperceptibly, it overshoots.
This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges.
At first glance, the Earth’s motion may appear to be shaped entirely by a single source: its most powerful influence, the Sun. But the Earth-Sun system is not static. Instead, our planet is pulled in many directions by innumerable small forces.
Its motion is shaped by the other seven planets in our solar system, each hundreds of millions of miles away. Those massive planetary neighbors had their motion fundamentally shaped by the tugs of innumerable ancient asteroids in the early solar system. Those, in turn, were shaped by the influence of distant passing stars—whose own trajectories were altered by the collective impact of stars, gas, and dark matter across the Milky Way.
This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges. The direction of our world is determined by countless infinitesimal forces compounding to move not only mountains, but entire planets.
Just as the Earth’s motion is shaped by the sum of small forces, the direction of humanity is shaped by the sum of small choices that people make every day. We often think that making an impact looks like a single person conveying their idea to the public at large, proclaiming from a platform. Sometimes, yes, change does require a spark, the one person who says something. But the true power in these proclamations comes not from their splash, but from the ripples that they create. And a series of small ripples can create waves.
Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple. Rosa Parks helped ignite the Civil Rights movement by refusing to move from her seat on a bus. The #MeToo movement arose from a single conversation in which a woman was deeply affected by a young girl’s experience with abuse. The invention of MRI began as a scribble on the back of a napkin.
Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple.
It may sometimes seem as if the very strongest forces — or the very loudest voices — are the only ones that “matter.” Some forces, some voices, do have a disproportionate reach. In the enormity of the world, and of our Universe, we may feel small.
Yet the sum of small forces has, on Earth, made all the difference: subtly shifting the planet’s tilt and its path to produce Earth’s long-term climate cycles, dictate the timing of ice ages, and shape how life emerged and adapted on our planet. The modest tugs of the planets and of the moon, together with the cascading influence of the Milky Way environment, produce the conditions necessary for life as we know it on Earth.
Meaningful impact need not be bold and flashy. Our small, everyday choices seed change. Intentionally or not, in ways obvious or not, these decisions compound to budge the trajectory of our world.
So today I will treat the cashier at my grocery store with kindness. I will take the time to ask my neighbor about their day, and to listen with care. I will check in on friends and family members. I will tell the people I look up to how much I admire them, and why. In the flurry of headlines, apps, and work duties vying for my attention, I will choose compassion and intention.
None of us is helpless. Our actions—as well as the actions we don't take—make a real, tangible impact. So, ask yourself: in which direction will you push the world today?
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The Hawk at the Edge of Doing and Being
I suspect this hawk has never once felt the nag of the question, “What can I do?” Not about the climate crisis. Perhaps not about anything. What to do is something other animals seem to know innately and intimately, or perhaps don't need to know at all.
May 05, 2026
I live in the very heart of Atlanta, Georgia, affectionately called the "city in a forest." From my desk, where I work most days, I look out onto a stand of trees. Right at canopy height, it is the perfect view for getting distracted, especially by our resident red-tailed hawk, who is strikingly visible in the loose thatching of bare winter limbs.
Sudden squirrel scatter, and she alights on the branch of a maple tree to scan for potential prey. Her fleet perch and keen watch, her grandeur of feather and hunt—it breaks through the primacy of my screen and shakes me from the fathomless digital world. Interruption gladly received.
Each time the hawk stops through these trees, I am struck by the sudden proximity of a taloned huntress to me, encased in my condo-version of captivity. More than once, I have grabbed my phone to quickly frame the hawk and catch ill-focused evidence that I too am alert and alive. Enraptured by a raptor, I have "Slacked" the flattened scene to my colleagues: “Afternoon visitor!” With a feather and a heart emoji afterword. (As if icons in miniature could limn her.)
But I am struck by another proximity, too, between what the hawk does and who the hawk seems to be. Her doingness and her beingness are so close as to become one.
What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?
I suspect this hawk has never once felt the nag of the question, “What can I do?” Not about the climate crisis. Perhaps not about anything. What to do is something other animals seem to know innately and intimately, or perhaps don't need to know at all.
Evolution has made things more complicated for us Homo sapiens, who ponder and puzzle. As essayist and author Margaret Renkl writes, "Every living thing—every bird and mammal and reptile and amphibian, every tree and shrub and flower and moss—is pursuing its own vital purpose, a purpose that sets my human concerns in a larger context." As I watch the hawk's wings lift and lower and propel her back into the air, I marvel and muse whether life itself might offer another way in.
What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?
The hawk, like all of us existing on this planet, is an inheritor of a 3.8-billion-year history: From single-celled organisms to plants and vertebrates, life has continued to move forward toward more life, overcoming unthinkable odds. Weighty and unwavering and in so many ways impenetrable—this dynamic defines Earth as a living planet. When we think about a hive of honeybees gathering their ingredients from flowers, or black corals siphoning plankton over centuries, or the sudden emergence of mushrooms from a shrouded fungal network, we can see this dynamic in action. Even kudzu offers testimony with its rampant return, however unwelcome, each spring.
Who can we be? One thing we already are: an expression of Earth's life force, right here, right now, made possible by a series of miracles that have blossomed over eons. This is true simply by virtue of breathing.
Life force unfurls through each of us in such beautifully different ways. We explore the unknown and document our discoveries. We design new things and give them form. We expose what's ruptured and source the means to mend it. We reflect, wonder, and imagine. We craft stories and art and shows. We make ritual. We convene people and foster conversation and collaboration. We care for one another. We strategize, organize, and orchestrate. We engineer and implement. We manage the details. We show up, stand up, and speak up. We share wisdom and tell jokes. We cook and sing and clean and plant and build and nap. And all of that is just the briefest inventory of human beings' doings.
There are things we do that are so wholly connected with who we are—that spring up from within us in such an organic way—that the space between our doing and our being shrinks or even vanishes. In those moments, our small expression of the vast life force we've inherited and embody is especially effervescent. We may find ourselves buzzing, flowing, or sensing a particular warmth. We may be especially porous and focused both.
It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are.
I imagine this is how the hawk might feel as she swoops into the circle of life. It's how I wish many more of us to feel as we take wing to heal the climate crisis.
In Climate Wayfinding, we think of the ways we each express life force as our unique talents, gifts, or superpowers—all of which are so very needed in this era of change. Two lenses help illuminate them: authentic power and deep joy.
Authentic power is something that rises up from within us—internal and genuine, not gained at others' expense or expended upon them. It's a feeling of ability, capacity, strength, weight, energy, vigor. It aligns what swells within us with how we move in the world.
Deep joy is a feeling of great pleasure, happiness, delight, exhilaration, radiance, bliss. It, too, rises from within and spills out, intermingling with the world around us. It is often the emotional glow of meaning or connection. Joy may also feel out of place in the face of the climate crisis. Who are we to taste joy when so much is hurting? But joy is all the more necessary, and all the more holy, in difficult times.
As Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: "Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."
In my own experience, moving at the nexus of authentic power and deep joy might be our closest approximation to life force itself. When I have strayed far into zones of not-power and not-joy—most often for employment or another hard-tugging should—I have found myself in struggle, disconnection, and even depression. Stubborn is the soul, intent on a space where it belongs.
It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are. I mean radical in the fullest sense: from the root, fundamental, and far-reaching. A person anchored and aglow—that is the kind of revolutionary that's called for in this time.
Looking inward to shape our outward contributions—this, I think, is a form of courage. When we refuse to lose touch with our sources of authentic power and deep joy, and when we dare to center them somehow in our lives, we reach toward calling. Whether loudly or in a whisper, these things summon us, insisting that our lives can be alive—sprouting and blooming, swooping and flying high—and that we can be part of making it so.
Just now, the red-tailed hawk draws my eye. It's a beautiful, bewitching thing to behold a being in the fullness of herself. But I realize, watching her in motion, that I am rapt by more than the solitary bird. At the edges of the self, there is a zone, almost an aura, of arising. We find there, at the periphery, a space populated by all that is emergent with, and only with, the world around us.
For the hawk, that emergent edge exists in the remarkable everyday interplay of hunger and wing and wind. And perhaps it is so for all of us, along our own edges, as we muster skill and strength for a planet in want, in wish.
Perhaps you, too, can feel the vibration at the eager verge of doingness and beingness and the wide, long, insistent breath of life.
This piece was adapted from Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home by Katharine K. Wilkinson (Andrews McMeel, 2026). Used with permission of the publisher. Do not republish.
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Knitting the Anti-Trump Resistance—One Pink or Red Hat at a Time
The color of the hats might have changed over these years, but what has not changed is the core message: the symbolism of knitting as the slow work required to build a movement, and the need to take the time to plan before acting.
Feb 15, 2026
The pattern for a bright red melt the ICE hat popped up in my news feed the other day, and I immediately knew I had to knit one. That the pattern for the freshly renamed hat reproduces the pointed, tasseled hats Norwegians wore in the 1940s as a symbol of protest against Nazi occupation; that it comes from a small woman-owned yarn store in Minnesota at a time when it feels we are not far away from the catastrophe of Fascism and Nazism; that the proceeds from buying the pattern go to organizations that protect immigrant rights. All of this made it even more urgent that I get hold of some red yarn and start casting my stitches without delay.
I learned to knit as a young child from a woman who had herself learned from a woman who had herself learned from a woman. In Italy, where I was born and grew up, this was the norm for girls, though boys were never taught the craft.
As a teen, I enjoyed the meditative quality of the repetitive work of making something grow, one knot at a time. I marveled at the magic of my hands transforming linear yarn into a multidimensional artifact. I learned the patience needed to make and unmake and remake something until I could get it not perfect but good enough. I absorbed the anti-consumerist message of frogging, or unraveling, an old sweater that no longer fits and reusing the yarn to make a new one. I grasped the necessity to create plans before jumping into action.
Then life got in the way, and I let it all fall to the side while I concentrated on becoming a scientist and relocating to the United States to work in biomedical research. My hands turned to handling pipettes and tubes rather than yarn and needles.
But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.
But without my consciously knowing it, it became clear that the same skills were needed in the lab as in putting together a knitting project. There it was, the need to slow down and plan ahead, to repeat the same gesture over and over again, to reuse old concepts for new discoveries, to build step by step until a complex theory emerges from the simplicity of a single experiment. During those years, my brain might have forgotten the practicalities of knitting, but the underlying lessons were all there.
In early 2016, after more than 20 years in the US, I applied for citizenship, hoping to contribute my vote against what would become President Donald Trump’s first term. Bureaucracy was too slow to allow me the privilege to cast my vote that year, but it did not stifle my willingness to protest what I saw as a dangerous development.
The pussyhat, which became a symbol of the protest movement against President Trump, brought me back to knitting. I got hold of some bright pink yarn and needles at my local women-owned yarn store and discovered that my hands still had the muscle memory of what I had learned decades earlier on the other side of the world. I knit a bunch of pussyhats for myself and my friends, which we sported at the Chicago’s women’s march on the gorgeous, hopeful day that was January 21, 2017.
It’s now almost 10 years later, and here we are again, knitting hats against the dangers to our democracy. The hat’s color has changed, from the pink that represented women’s rights to the red now pointing to the defense of immigrants’ rights. As a woman immigrant, I need both and I am sure I will need more in the future.
The color of the hats might have changed over these years, but what has not changed is the core message: the symbolism of knitting as the slow work required to build activism and resistance, and the need to take the time to plan before acting. Knitting as the symbol of the patience it takes to build something meaningful and complex, one knot at a time. As the symbol of the need to constantly make and remake, to reuse what we built in the past to create something that fits the moment. And of knitting, just like quilting, embroidery, and other textile crafts, as reclaiming the role of women in history.
Yes, I know, a handmade hat will not determine the success of our resistance. Just like the pussyhats did not prevent a second Trump term, the melt the ICE hats by themselves will not stop the violence perpetrated against immigrants and those who try to protect them. But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.
When I went to get my skein of yarn the other day, a young man wearing the same bright red hat I was planning to make was at the store, chatting with the owner, who had set aside a basket of skeins of red yarn. The young man told me, matter-of-factly, that he had just finished knitting the hat he was wearing and was there to buy some yarn to make a few more hats for his friends.
And there it was, the symbolism personified. A male knitter, unthinkable when I was a young girl, who let me know, without needing to explain it, that women’s history should not only be reclaimed but also shared with those who can treasure it. A red hat and a basket of red yarn that signaled, “You have nothing to fear here.” That told me that the accent that inflects my English was welcome, not despised. That I did not need the copy of the US passport I have started to take with me wherever I go. That we can do this, together, one knot at a time.
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