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 working from the belief that craftsmanship and skilled artistry are not going extinct but are essential for creating a more kind, fair, generous, and lovely world. We believe 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 in the making.