On reading and stitching together.
A circle is an enchanted space, especially a circle of people. Something special happens: a synchronization of blinks, a gradual attunement to each other’s rhythms, and a shared responsiveness. I have had the joy of sitting in many such circles—to read, to listen, to talk about the moon, and lately, to embroider.
STITCHING MOONLIGHT
“There was a HUGE rat in the house that winter—it must have been seven years ago, just before my husband passed,” said Christine. When her rat-chase story ended, another embroiderer shared her own pest encounter, followed by a woman who reflected on losing her husband. The story grew around the circle. We stitched and shared, sometimes laughing, sometimes quiet with private grief.
This circle was in Settle, a small town in northern UK. That rainy morning, ten women drove from distant villages to attend our Chader Buri Nakshi Kantha workshop. We drank tea with milk, embroidered shosthir shingho spirals, and talked for hours. Round and round, from the inside outward, the spiral pattern formed like a good conversation—circling in, drawing everything together.
At one o’clock, the community dissolved as participants put away their embroidery and drove home for lunch. Yet, silently, we had agreed to be available to each other—for stitching tips, pest-control advice, or grief support. This is the instantaneous nature of community. As Esther Perel reminds us, “The quality of your life is dictated by the quality of your relationships.” The same applies to the quality of our communities and how we give to them.
On our Chader Buri story-prompt UK tour, we invited people to create stories with us, using kantha motifs and embroidering new symbols of their own. The prompt has two sides: black for a moonless night, white for a full-moon night. The original tale is less a story than a beginning—an invitation to spin a new one. Everywhere we went, we began, “On a moonless night, Chader Buri was looking out at the world, and what did she see?…” Participants responded, and together we created new worlds in the air. Invention takes courage; co-invention, vulnerability.
As Chader Buri looks out at the world today, she may see more discord than cohesion. Earlier in September, I watched a lunar eclipse with a small group of people, with whom I am now forever connected. For a few hours, we watched the moon vanish into shadow and re-emerge, agreeing to spend the night in shared silence under the sky. Contemplating the ancestral granny on the moon, I began rethinking the kind of world I want to live in: on what agreements do I organize, and with whom do I come together?
Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community, there is no liberation… but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” She warned against the isolation of individualism. The nationalist vision of citizenship is a pragmatic arrangement to sustain divide-and-rule. Lorde urges us to come together across acknowledged differences, toward a greater whole. Our differences should foster cohesion, not division.
THE SMALL PINK CIRCLE
For five years, I have been reading together with others. Reading is usually solitary—the way you are reading this text now is unique to you. Reading together is an act of compromise, an acknowledgment of infinite points of view.
The Sister Library community is porous: old and young, religious and ambiguous, male, female, non-binary, students, dropouts, entrepreneurs, academics. All sorts come—and often not even in the library. We gather to read, rethink characters, ask questions, and create. For five years, people have entered, left, and returned without obligation. Once is enough and lasting.
Communities need no permission to form. They are discreet, organic ways of coming together. Many remain invisible—taboo, hidden networks of support among like-minded or like-desiring people. Others seek visibility, banding together to occupy space as a collective mass.
For me, community rests on two pillars: freedom of movement and availability. You give what you can. The structure varies, but belonging is enduring while presence is a choice. For many, a community is a chosen family. In the quiet acts of stitching or reading together, we agree to be alone together, to check in and share, to look each other in the eye, at the same level, and to say, “we are in this, together.”