Epic Skill Swap

This past weekend I woke up an hour early Friday morning to pack for the Epic Skill Swap.  I ran to the car, guitar and djembe in hand, and managed to get to work only a few minutes late.  The day passed slowly as I anticipated the long weekend and I left quickly to go pick up three strangers from the train station.

As it turned out, one of them wasn’t a stranger, we had met when I gave a talk on my knitted canvasses at Ignite Craft in January 2013.  And that was just the beginning.

The weekend started with an opening circle where all the participants shared where they were from (mostly Boston, Providence, and Burlington) and what they were looking for over the weekend.  After over two months of wonderful but endless events, I was going in exhausted and trying very hard to break-free of the marketing/business mindset.

But I was also incredibly excited because I was going to see my second tiny home.  Built down in North Carolina and driven up by my friend Drew specifically for this event, the tiny house was the reason I decided to go to the Epic Skill Swap in the first place.  And if all that had happened was the two hour talk with nearly 20 people crammed inside the house, it would have been worth it.  But there was much, much more.

Over the next two days I learned how to make soap, I ran singing down a hill with a group of people and jumped into a lake, told stories from my childhood for over forty people, contra-danced, participated in my first Quaker worship, and even got a last minute group of people together to make a small mural based off of Don’t Make Art, Just Make Something.

But though skills were the catalyst for the event, they weren’t the core of it.  Instead, what made the weekend were the connections that happened both inside and outside of workshops.  On Saturday evening, there was a large story swap with the prompts “Did you smell that?” and “Safe at home.”  As the stories wound down, the music started up and we crammed onto couches, pressed up between people we had just met and people we had known for years, barely distinguishing between the two.  I got closer to people I had met only a few times before, met people who I was already connected to through friends, and met complete strangers.

And, if all of those wonderful people and the beautiful natural setting wasn’t enough, there was a legitimate horizon to horizon double rainbow.  So, of course, we all stood in a circle and sing Over the Rainbow.  Because once you throw away your cynicism and just embrace what’s happening, what else is there to do?