Good morning—I have news! And despite having carried this news around so close to my heart since April, now that the hour is here and I absolutely have to share it with you, I’m really tripping over myself finding the words. It is with so much hope, love, fear, pride, relief, excitement, confusion, clarity—all of it—that I announce I’m passing the reins of the CEO role back to the capable hands of my (exquisite!) husband, Alex, and continuing the slow but steady process of stepping out of East Fork’s daily operations and into the next chapter of my life. 🖤 13 years ago during the 2008 economic crisis I lost a job in sustainable ag education in NYC and took for the Blue Ridge Mountains where I—so deep in the fury of who am I/why am I here/what should I do/why does it matter—met and fell in love with a man crystal clear in his purpose and steady in his focus. On our second date we made out in a tub at Hot Springs and he cooked boeuf bourguignon, and after, he pulled out his composition book and made little sketches of his would-be wood kiln and workshop and showed me pictures of pots he loved. Less than 6 months into dating Alex I’d committed to solving my own existential crisis by making myself indispensible to building out the dream he’d been carrying around like a seed in his shirt pocket since boyhood. It’s been a wild and beautiful adventure to birth East Fork to life and nurture it through infancy with Alex and John. In so many ways I’ve been brought up by it—a wide-open and dynamic platform for self-witnesssing and growth, every day a new opportunity to take big risks, fuck up hard, take accountabily, make changes, try again. [continued below!]