Loving Angela
I've been feeling really tender about unexpectedly seeing pictures of Angela on the internet this week, so, here's a picture of a bowl Ang gave my family a few years ago <3
September 2021
As many of you may know, we lost a powerful, loving, hilarious, and beautiful friend this week when Angela Berkfield passed on Tuesday evening.
Ang was one of the first people I met when I moved to Brattleboro about 11 years ago. I can still picture the first time we met. Her, extrovertedly tabling for Post Oil Solutions at the Winter Farmers’ Market at the River Garden, me new to town and nervous about meeting people. Over the coming weeks, months, and years, she connected me with so very many people that have continued to be major major parts of my life (including my spouse, Mel!) and big parts of Out in the Open community. It’s in large part, these Angela-based connections and community that have kept me here over the past decade and that have made this place home for me.
Some of our early time together was in a group we were both part of that was called “Women Dismantling White Supremacy” (I think the listserv still exists!). And we talked as a group about shifting the name and expanding the group when genderqueer and trans folks like me, Fischer, and others who didn’t identify as women were invited to join the space. We had collective conversations about gender, queerness, class, racial justice, liberation and so much more. Growing together into more of the fullness of where we all wanted and needed to be. Sometimes Ang and I talked about Mariah Carey karaoke, sometimes about land and climate justice, sometimes about kids or meatball ingredients or books or being self-employed or about a hummingbird who returns to her house annually always perching in the same spot. This week I continue receiving different flashes of memories of our conversations, laughter, disagreement, shared joy, shared sadness, and loving each other through it all. All of it, pieces of building an abundant and beautiful community.
The growth of The Root Social Justice Center, ACT 4 Social Justice, and Equity Solutions (all projects that Angela founded/was part of founding) coincided directly with the growth of Out in the Open in such lovely and symbiotic ways. Before OITO was ever close to having a space of our own, we had a home at The Root. When we moved away from offering trainings, we were able to refer folks to ACT and Equity Solutions, making space for us to grow in our work in different ways while supporting the growth of those two groups while continuing to meet needs in the community through our trusted relationships. To see that space/those spaces and so many other necessary structures in our community manifested over the years has been so motivating, so connective. OITO is who we are now because this beautiful community has been who we have been together. And for me, so much of that was sparked in this place through Angela.
AND Ang was so much more than her work. We are all so much more than our work. I have been so inspired by her decision soon after her diagnosis last year to move back from her volunteer and paid work to focus on her healing. Watching her make that move 18+ months ago has helped me prioritize my own health and healing this year (I just had my first ever craniosacral session today, for instance!) and helped us make some big shifts in how we do our work here at OITO, too. So deeply needed, and so very hard to do!
She was a brilliant, fallible, complex, loving, wonderfully human human who was constantly learning on her own and in community while continuing to show up to help us all and love us all through the long work of getting a little bit closer, a little bit closer, and a little bit closer to building the world we want to see.
Ang, my friend, you are so deeply loved and so deeply missed.
- HB