VISIT: Yestermorrow Design/Build School
My week away to process grief, build a table, steep myself in community.
Hello!
I am back! Or whatever that means!
For the past several weeks, an incredible team of friends and peers have provided guest posts, while I waded through the logistical spirals and emotional sludge of grief.
Two huge scoops of gratitude, in waffle cone, with sprinkles, hot fudge, if you like that, and probably a cherry, to Ani, Erin, Garrett, Jinnie, Katie and Rose. What a gift and luxury to have a supportive (and talented!) community.
I am back, though I still vacillate between acute feelings and numb and foggy cognitive dissonance. Meanwhile, now back, I find that many are managing similar feelings post-election. I am by no means an expert in grief, nor a counsellor—imagine!—but I have certainly been “in it” the past 10+ weeks and—well, maybe there’s something in here I can offer.
For instance, I’ve noticed a lot of phrasing and strategies that are familiar to me from this period. For one, the mention of the word ‘grief’ itself; but also the reframing—what’s important now is to look inward, look to your community, find joy where you can, rest!, buckle up because this feeling may last a while.
And of course, all of that is true, but I wanted to share one of the best things I’ve done for myself since the first days of September: I attended a Women’s + Intro to Furniture Making class at Yestermorrow in Vermont.
Yestermorrow is a design/build school in the Waitsfield, tucked into the extremely beautiful Mad River Valley, with two well-known ski mountains right there: Mad River Glen and Sugarbush. The latter is what attracted three Yale architects to the area in the late 1970s, where they eventually founded the school in 1980. Yestermorrow has a broad range of classes: everything from one-week, no-experience-necessary classes like mine to an immersive, semester-long project for college credit. And many, many offerings in between.
My primary reason for being there was to gain confidence using power tools, especially saws. As we know, I like to make many things, but I kept feeling like my instinct to (a) slink away from a project because I’d have to make a cut or two or (b) get other people to make my cuts for me, was getting in the way of making all the things I really can (!) and want to make.
You’ll notice, I’m sure, that the class I took was labeled as ‘Women’s +’—Yestermorrow has an ambitious and robust set of inclusion goals they are working on. One of the ways they are working towards these goal is through what they call ‘affinity groups.’ I know some find being in all-women groups difficult, but as someone who happily attended all-girl’s school for 10 years (ilysm), I hoped it would foster the kind of environment that’s free from posturing and bombast (especially around power tools!). And yet, the night before class, I thought, ‘Oh no, this is horribly corny; I should have/could have signed up for the ~regular~ version of this class.’
It’s funny to have been in a so-called ‘affinity group,’ but to find the people therein so very different. I’m not sure any of us really made long-term friends that week (maybe it was just me!), but we were tight-knit and supportive and helpful and kind to each other for forty hours, while navigating violent machinery and persnickety measurements. The rugged and bejeweled septuagenarian from Western Maine; the Zoomer, burnt out on college and taking a gap year; the gender nonconforming farmer from Western Mass; the engineer from Portland; the children’s book illustrator from suburban Connecticut; the sonographer from outside Boston—we were a wide ranging group, but we were joyful and working with our hands and, I have to say, when I was there, tucked into the valley, the rest of the world floated away. And the group wasn’t actually corny—we were a delightful, powerful coven of wood witches.
How to navigate a time of big feelings? I don’t actually know, but that week, my grief was at once far way and intimately held by this rag-tag group—a therapeutic salve of mental and physical presence (you know, if you checked out, there’s a chance you’d leave a finger behind), of being vey deeply in community, of working on individual goals, together.
Cute lil orange guy. (LINK)
Anyone feeling moony in Berkeley with a spare $4k? (LINK)
Curvy, cozy. (LINK)
If you really want to check out for a minute. (LINK)
