The Eden's Heart Woodworks Story

My name is Kyle Kramer, and I’m an unapologetic idealist.  I’m also an utter pragmatist, and I’ve always loved to work with my hands.  Eden’s Heart Woodworks was born of and is sustained by the combination of those two qualities.

I went to college and graduate school planning to pursue a career in ministry and academic theology, but I was wonderfully derailed when a great mentor of mine, the conservationist and writer Scott Russell Sanders, introduced me to farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry.  Through letters, visits, and his published writing, Wendell became another great mentor.  As I became steeped in Wendell’s ideas, my tidy life plans and ambitions unraveled and I found myself yearning to follow his example and craft a simple rural life. 

After graduating from Emory University with a Master of Divinity, I was single and young enough to try something crazy: I came home.  I bought 27 acres of rough land in south central Indiana, about an hour east of where I grew up, and I set about creating an organic farm and homestead.  Two important things happened: first, I realized organic farming is a very difficult way to make a living.  So, I ended up finding a job running graduate theology and ministry formation programs at a nearby Benedictine monastery, Saint Meinrad, where I worked alongside the monks for fifteen years and absorbed their inspiring commitment to ora et labora, work and prayer.  Throughout this time, I farmed and wrote on the side. 

Second, through whatever miracle of Providence, I met a beautiful, soulful, artistic woman willing to share in this crazy dream, and Cyndi and I farmed, gardened, and raised three lovely, analog, free-range children together.  I also leaned into carpentry and woodworking, as we designed and built a highly efficient solar-powered home, which I filled with cabinetry and trim from local woods.  In 2006, done with the house, I started selling woodcraft products, mainly lathe-turned wooden pens.  Woodworking was a wonderful hobby and side-hustle that waxed and waned over the years.

In 2014, we made the difficult decision to leave Genesis Farm and my work at Saint Meinrad so I could take an exciting new job running the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, an interfaith spirituality center in Louisville, KY, dedicated to teaching mindfulness and other contemplative spiritual practices for personal growth, supporting healthy communities, and fostering ecological care.  We sold our beloved farm – a heartbreak I may never get over – and moved to a heavily-wooded eight-acre property in the rolling hills of Harrison County, Indiana.  For the next eleven years, I served as executive director and then CEO of the Earth & Spirit Center.  Between that amazing and challenging job, and helping Cyndi raise our children, I didn’t have much time for woodworking, and my equipment mainly gathered dust.

I came back to woodworking several years ago as an active avocation. My stepdad, Nelson Rivers, had become a very serious woodworker when he retired. He outfitted an incredible shop and, with several neighborhood buddies, turned out some phenomenally beautiful work, all of which he either gave away or sold and then donated the profits to charities. I apprenticed with him in my spare time, and over several years, he mentored me in so many aspects of the craft. Woodworking bonded us in a powerful way that’s hard to describe.

My work as a nonprofit CEO, while meaningful and satisfying, eventually began to cause me a great deal of stress.  Woodworking became a necessary therapy.  Inspired by Nelson’s shop, I began to put my own shop in good order, and I spent a lot of evenings and weekends making sawdust, in his shop or mine.

For all the years we woodworked together, Nelson would always tell me that when he died or could no longer do woodworking, his equipment would come to me.  In August 2024, having been in phenomenally good health all his life, Nelson suffered a massive stroke, which has left him requiring 24-7 care in a nursing home.  In a way I had never wanted, I was suddenly faced with the questions of what I would do with all his tools and how I might carry on his woodworking legacy.

The stress and strain of my nonprofit leadership work finally became too great to bear, and in April 2025 I resigned from my job.  With my wife Cyndi and our grown daughters Eva and Clare, I co-founded Eden’s Heart Collective, a multi-generational family collaboration around creativity and spirituality.  Within Eden’s Heart Collective, Eden’s Heart Woodworks was born. True to my workaholic nature, I set myself to it with willpower, enthusiasm, and long hours.

It's the rare dream that doesn’t encounter significant setbacks along the way.  Not a month after starting Eden’s Heart Woodworks, what I thought were run-of-the-mill, middle-age aches and pains became increasingly severe, to a point where I began to struggle with the physical demands of woodworking and sawmilling.  I suffered increasingly excruciating and debilitating pain and was eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that caused terrible inflammatory arthritis throughout my body. I went through a monthslong dark night of the soul, struggling against hopelessness and despair, fearing I was the victim of a cruel cosmic joke and that my new dream of full-time craftsmanship would be stillborn.

Eventually, however, I got on an effective medication and was able to return to the woodshop, albeit in a new way.  Having a chronic illness has forced me to learn a lesson that I should have learned a long time ago: to listen more carefully to my body and to work within its limits.  In this, my illness has given me and my craftsmanship a great gift: the ability to resist the temptation, so prevalent in our culture and economy, to go faster and do more.  I want my craftsmanship always to be rooted in care, and care requires that you slow down and pay attention: to your body, to the materials, to the work at hand.  It’s not an efficient process – I can’t crank out widgets – but I hope that everything coming out of my shop embodies the love that governed its making.  Because, in the end, the world does not need more widgets, but I believe it definitely needs things made with the slow deliberation that love and care require. For how else but through love and care can a new, kinder, more sustainable civilization be born?