Eden's Heart Woodworks
Beautiful things, made with love, prayer, and care
In an age of mass production and destruction, Eden's Heart Woodworks goes against the grain. We’re a small, home-based workshop with a big idea: that bespoke craftsmanship and skilled artistry are not going extinct but are essential for creating a more kind, fair, generous, and lovely world. Standing in the lineage of Wendell Berry, E.F. Schuhmacher, and a great cloud of other witnesses, we believe in soulcraft: that good work, done well, is spiritually redemptive and is necessary for the health of our communities and our planet.
Craftsmanship Ethic
Eden's Heart Woodworks is guided by three core principles:
Beauty will save the world.
This idea of novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, which became a mantra for Catholic activist Dorothy Day, points to the spiritual and philosophical truth that the world won’t ultimately be saved by laws, economic policies, or data – necessary as they all may be – but by love, rooted in wonder and appreciation for the divine gift of everything that is. As we understand it, beauty is not the exclusive domain of art galleries, museums, or fashion models. It’s available to all of us, every day, in well-made, useful objects, in parents’ care for their children, in the splendor of the natural world. Beauty is how spirit shines through all things.
Small is beautiful.
The British economist E. F. Schumacher made this phrase famous in his book by the same name. He, and Mahatma Ghandi before him, thought it was possible – and preferable – to avoid the Big-ization of the industrial world and that smaller, more locally-based means of producing goods and services are more socially healthy, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually satisfying. For us at Eden's Heart Woodworks, small is beautiful means we keep our workshop human-scaled, so we can know each other, know our community of customers, have a lower ecological footprint, and lavish our love, attention, and skill on each individual product we produce in our shop.
Spirit lives in matter.
Rooted in a Catholic sacramental tradition, we believe that the world is sacred. It’s not a place we should try to escape in an effort to find God, as this is the very place where God dwells. Any and every part of this world, if encountered with an open heart, can reveal the Love that weaves together all fibers of Creation. Because Spirit lives in matter, we strive for ecological sustainability. And in our workshop, our work is a form of prayer: we seek to experience that divine love and to reflect it by pouring our own love and care into what we make. We hope that when you hold or behold something we’ve made, you’ll feel that love and find joy in the owning as we have found joy – alongside frustrations and smashed thumbs – in the making.
The Eden's Heart Woodworks Story
My name is Kyle Kramer, and I’m an unapologetic idealist. I’m also an utter pragmatist who has always loved to work with my hands. Eden's Heart Woodworks was born from 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. I wanted to craft a simple, creative rural life on an organic farm.
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 farmland in south central Indiana, about an hour from where I grew up in Evansville, and set about creating Genesis Farm, an organic farm and homestead. Two important things happened: first, I realized organic farming is a very difficult way to make a living. 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 continued farming and writing on the side. Second, through whatever miracle of Providence, I met a beautiful, soulful, artistic woman willing to share in this preposterous dream, and Cyndi and I farmed, gardened, and raised three lovely, free-range children together. Genesis Woodworks was born on Genesis Organic Farm, as we designed and built a solar-powered, highly efficient home, which I filled with cherry trim I milled myself, solid-wood doors, hickory flooring, and home-made maple cabinetry. 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 those years.
In 2014, we made the difficult decision to leave Genesis Organic 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 Genesis 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 for two reasons. First, 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 way that’s hard to describe.
Second, my work as a nonprofit CEO, while meaningful and satisfying, eventually began to cause me an unsustainable level of stress and burnout. 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.
Then, disaster struck. 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 severely debilitated and requiring 24-7 care in a nursing home. I was suddenly faced with the questions of what I would do with all of his tools and how I would carry on his woodworking legacy.
Finally, in early 2025, I resigned from my job as CEO to try a radical experiment. With kids grown and some savings to live on for a while, I wanted to see if it is possible to support a family through full-time creative pursuits: woodworking, writing, podcasting, and co-leading retreats and workshops with my wife Cyndi, an artist and spiritual director.
Genesis Woodworks was reborn as Eden's Heart Woodworks, providing me a way to honor my stepdad Nelson and to take a leap of faith into the life I’d been dreaming about for more than a quarter-century, since those idealistic days of reading Wendell Berry. It is a journey – a journey of faith, love, and hope. I hope you can become part of it.