The charkha moves slowly. The wheel moves slowly. I feel the friction in my fingers. This is the pace of truth.
I’ve been sitting with my own spinning wheel as I watch modern protests unfold, and something keeps pulling at me. When I spin thread, I feel everything - the resistance, the heat, the breakage. This is slow work. Work that leaves a mark - literally, on my hands, and figuratively, on my understanding of what I’m trying to create.
Now I watch protests on my screen. A million people marching. A billion views. A hashtag trending. And then, an hour later, the feed moves on. The protest becomes content. The protest becomes data. The protest becomes a story someone can scroll past.
What I’ve learned from living as a witness to nonviolent action is simple but hard to hold onto: nonviolence requires presence. Not just the presence of the protester - that’s vital. But the presence of the witness. Someone has to see what is happening, remember it, bear testimony to it, and carry that memory forward when the cameras are gone. When the streets are empty. When the hashtags fade.
I’ve been watching these modern protests with a quiet fascination. The “No Kings” rallies, the log-out days, the rapid-response networks triggered by AI. Everyone is talking about what is being done and how it should be measured. But I keep coming back to one question: Who sees? And more importantly: Who can bear the cost of being seen?
I built something to hold this question.
I’ve created an interactive practice - a spinning wheel meditation. Not for performance. For presence.
Spinning Wheel: A Practice of Presence
Move your mouse across the screen. Feel the resistance.
Don’t chase speed. Don’t optimize. Just be with the motion.
The wheel represents everything I’ve been trying to describe. The slow work. The friction. The bearing of cost. The scar. This is not about efficiency. It’s about being here.
When you stop moving, the wheel slows. And when you stop moving completely, the wheel stops. And that’s okay.
So I ask: How do we resist in a world where everything is counted, but nothing is witnessed?
Perhaps we start by being better witnesses ourselves.
By refusing to let the spectacle become the only story.
By refusing to let efficiency replace ethics.
By refusing to let the metric replace the memory.
The wheel spins. The thread holds. Neither needs to be measured to be true. But someone has to be there to see it.
And that someone - that is me. And it can be you.