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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!” (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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Charlotte’s Web, Redeployed: A Children’s Tale in the Hands of Power
White’s literary legacy is rooted in empathy, care, and the affirmation of life; the bureaucratic appropriation of his title stands in stark, almost satirical contrast to the world he sought to illuminate.
Nov 19, 2025
Growing up, there were a few books that left an indelible mark on me. Charlotte’s Web was one of them. Tolerance. Embracing those who are different. Overcoming fears. Seeing miracles in the ordinary. Having faith in the goodness of our neighbors. Love.
So when I saw that a federal immigration sweep in Charlotte, North Carolina had been named Charlotte’s Web, I felt a sharp, immediate repulsion. They were being clever—but how many of them had actually read the book? How different this country might be if more people absorbed its lessons: that protecting the vulnerable is an act of courage, not political theater.
Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899-October 1, 1985) was an American writer whose work has endured across generations. He authored beloved children’s books, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte’s Web ranked first among the top 100 children’s novels. Beyond children’s literature, White contributed to The New Yorker and co-authored The Elements of Style, the iconic English-language style guide. Kurt Vonnegut described him as “one of the most admirable prose stylists our country has so far produced.”
It is in this context—of a writer celebrated for clarity, humanity, and moral vision—that the repurposing of Charlotte’s Web for a mass immigration raid becomes especially jarring. White’s literary legacy is rooted in empathy, care, and the affirmation of life; the bureaucratic appropriation of his title stands in stark, almost satirical contrast to the world he sought to illuminate.
Charlotte herself, the real Charlotte, not the bureaucratic parody, spins her web to protect, not punish. She acts out of friendship, not force.
On a quiet Saturday in Charlotte, 81 people were arrested in roughly five hours as federal agents conducted a phase of the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown. Officers swept neighborhoods near churches and apartment complexes. Streets were unusually empty, businesses shuttered, and families stayed home, unsure whether their neighbors, or the law, could be trusted.
Gregory Bovino, the North Carolina-born Border Patrol commander leading “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” posted on X a quotation from the story’s ending, when Charlotte’s children float away on the wind:
Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.
The irony is almost literary. In White’s story, the line is a meditation on freedom, impermanence, and the continuity of life, Charlotte’s children carried safely into a larger world after she has saved the pig. In Bovino’s hands, it frames a mass roundup, turning human beings into objects carried off by a bureaucratic breeze.
White himself described the inspiration behind Charlotte’s Web:
The theme of Charlotte’s Web is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.
Martha White, who manages her grandfather’s literary estate, made clear that his ethos could not be more distant from these raids. E.B. White “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons,” she told CNN, adding, “He didn’t condone fearmongering.” He believed in due process, in the rule of law, and in the basic dignity of life.
The spectacle of the Charlotte operation extended to social media, where detainees’ faces and alleged criminal histories were posted as proof of public safety. Here, White’s words carry a sting:
Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.
Activists handed out whistles to warn neighbors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence. Community members skipped work, school, and medical appointments. One dental clinic alone reported nine cancellations.
“Latinos love this country. They came here to escape socialism and communism, and they’re hard workers and people of faith,” said Paola Garcia, spokesperson for Camino, a nonprofit serving Charlotte’s Latino community. “They love their family, and it’s just so sad to see that this community now has this target on their back.”
Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of immigrant advocacy group Siembra NC, called the operation “a shameful day for the North Carolina Republican Party,” noting the celebration of what she described as “terrorist operations” and the recycling of Bovino’s rhetoric about “going after criminals.”
Before Saturday, the largest number of immigrant arrests in a single day in North Carolina was 30. Eighty-one in five hours—nearly triple the previous record, underscores the unprecedented scale of federal enforcement in a city already trembling with fear.
White wrote:
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
And Charlotte herself, the real Charlotte, not the bureaucratic parody, spins her web to protect, not punish. She acts out of friendship, not force:
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you… By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
The contrast is stark. Charlotte’s web lifts; the raids constrict. The story teaches mercy; the sweep instills fear. Charlotte’s purpose is care; the operation’s purpose is spectacle. As White noted elsewhere:
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
Here, millions of hours of planning, messaging, and social-media framing were devoted to constructing enemies, while the human cost, fear, disruption, and trauma, remained largely invisible.
White’s fascination with animals and mortality lent his work an “eerie quality,” and he often described books themselves as “sneezes,” unexpected, uncontainable eruptions of human empathy. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this real-life web demonstrates the inverse: a calculated, coldly measured maneuver, a bureaucratic sneeze that spreads fear instead of care:
The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.
The authorities talked. They posted. They broadcast. But they did not listen. Families stayed home. Children missed school. Communities watched one another with suspicion. Safety, in the administration’s terms, was achieved only at the expense of freedom. And yet, White reminds us:
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
This is Charlotte’s enduring lesson: the value of life, the importance of compassion, the courage to act out of love. Freedom, dignity, and human connection cannot be suspended at the altar of political performance. The people caught in this web may be removed, but their absence leaves a void that no number of arrests can fill.
Charlotte’s web, whether in a children’s book or in our daily lives, asks us to choose differently. To see, to listen, to protect. To be, as White’s story quietly insists, the kind of neighbor, and the kind of nation, that spins webs of care instead of cages.
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After No Kings Day, Feed Your Head
We should commit ourselves to becoming students of struggle because there is so much to be gained not simply from action, but from deliberative, informed, and educated action.
Oct 20, 2025
Now that No Kings Day October 2025 has come and gone, what should we do with all our energy?
The carnivalesque atmosphere of protest across the nation on Saturday fed a hunger for political community and solidarity in the face of the relentless assault on our basic democratic rights that has been raging since the start of this year.
The signage alone—from cats kicking crowns to “We in Danger, Girl: Resist”—called us to move from words to action. Now.
Act we should.
For there is plenty to do.
Histories of anti-authoritarian struggle are an indispensable storehouse of knowledge for the days and weeks after the protest is over.
Join the American Civil Liberties Union. Work to support anti-Trump candidates in the 2026 midterms. Write your elected representatives, including judges, to let them know you support their efforts to defend the Constitution. And find out what the local organizers of your No Kings Day have planned next.
We should do all these things.
But we should also read. And study. And debate. And learn.
I’m not kidding.
We should commit ourselves to becoming students of struggle because there is so much to be gained not simply from action, but from deliberative, informed, and educated action.
And history, especially Black history, is a crucial resource in this struggle.
Consider Augustus Wood’s recent book, Class Warfare in Black Atlanta, which maps the ways that working-class African American men and women fought the neoliberal takeover of Atlanta from the 1970s onwards, pushing against both white and Black elites seeking to bulldoze their communities in the name of economic development and “progress.”
Get to know the stories of Phyllis Whatley and Eva Davis, Black working women who built “overlapping” movements across space, housing, and labor to beat back Atlanta’s takeover by urban power brokers. We have so much to learn from their courage and their strategies.
If a scholarly book like Wood’s is too much to pick up, go to your local library and find a novel which fictionalizes key moments and movements in anti-democratic history. Try Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prizewinning The Underground Railroad. Or check out John Lewis’ memoir, Walking With the Wind.
Or if fiction doesn’t appeal, follow a short form like an op-ed. Top of that list right now is Bobby J. Smith’s piece, “Chicago Restaurants Using Civil Rights-Era Playbook to Fight ICE,” which reminds us how prescient, and present, the tactics of the recent past are.
And if reading per se isn’t the way you want to access lessons on how ordinary people fight the power of the state and its legal and carceral systems, check out the website of the MAMAs project, which documents in word and image how the mothers of unjustly incarcerated sons have developed powerful pedagogies over a decade-long struggle for the freedom of their kids.
History comes in many forms and formats. So, as the 1967 Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit” exhorts us, “feed your head.” By whatever means possible.
Because after we put away the No Kings signs for now, we need recourse to concrete examples of how to counter government-sponsored violence and fascist takeover—partly so we can be inspired by those who have come before, and partly so we can develop models based on past patterns and present strategies that we can put into action now.
It goes without saying, of course, that for many communities in the US and elsewhere, these struggles are not new. They are intensified, yes, but they build on micro- and macro-aggressions that have been rending the social and economic fabric for decades if not centuries.
It’s important to remember that wherever violence has happened and the state has exercised lethal power against citizens and other subjects, people have resisted. We have to know these histories.
Luckily, there is a deep and rich archive of protest movements that historians, professional and otherwise, have labored to assemble and preserve precisely to serve us in these times.
Which is exactly why the current regime is banning books, coming after courses and curricula which amplify these histories, and seeking to remake the story of the last 250 years in their own image.
They want to erase the history of survival and resistance which can and will be activated to challenge their arrogation of power—activated to resist the dismantling of democratic foundations and to protect anew those rights which have been hard won over the last two centuries.
Histories of anti-authoritarian struggle are an indispensable storehouse of knowledge for the days and weeks after the protest is over.
We need to study them, with the present in mind. So get out there and read up on the practical examples that Black history especially has to offer us as we seek not just solidarity, but usable forms and portable practices drawn from the work of those who came before us.
When we do so, we ourselves will be making histories available to those who come after us to learn from, to mobilize, and to improve on.
Feed your head, and the rest will follow.
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