In today’s environment of too much unwanted touching, it’s refreshing to find two professional cuddlers providing just the opposite in Northampton and Easthampton.
Danielle Eernisse and Nellie Wilson are certified by Cuddlist, a company based in New Jersey, and completed a two-week training program that prepared them to give their clients therapeutic, nonsexual, platonic touches.
Eernisse, 26, was drawn to New England to work on an organic farm in southern Vermont. She began to learn about platonic touching through a form of dance called contact improvisation. During a music and yoga festival in Tolland last year, Eernisse met a professional cuddler, who became her mentor.
After her Cuddlist training, Eernisse rented space first in Greenfield and now on Main Street in Northampton. A year later, she says, “When we feel connected, when we feel loved and understood, supported and lovable, we’re able to share our truest selves with the world.”
Part of the Cuddlist mission is to separate platonic touching from sexuality. “I feel like this field is doing some really revolutionary work decoupling sex and touch and normalizing the need and the desire for touch,” Eernisse says.
Most of her clients are men, and Eernisse says she has never felt worried or unsafe. If she senses that a client is becoming aroused, she asks, “How can we redirect that energy?”
Among her clients who pay $80 an hour to snuggle on a futon with her is John McGovern, a 60-year-old accountant who lives outside Hartford, Connecticut, and visits Eernisse about once a month. He talks with her about how he spent 28 years in an affectionless marriage as she caresses the back of his head.
“It’s just so calm here. It’s just really nice being held by somebody,” McGovern says. “I would never stand up for myself in any situation, especially asking for touch.” As he contemplates starting to date, he adds, “I think my self-esteem is getting a little better. I feel like I am more comfortable in my own skin.”
Some professional cuddlers specialize in working with specific groups of people. Nellie Wilson, 35, who is based in Easthampton, works mostly with clients who have disabilities or chronic illnesses, for whom touch mostly is clinical. “Cuddlist offers them space to to be a whole person and ask for exactly what they want,” Wilson says.
We are glad that Eernisse and Wilson are offering that kind of human contact — a simple act that can lead to powerful healing.
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A multimedia design company in Hatfield has played a major role in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that opened Dec. 9.
Monadnock Media Inc. oversaw the work on the galleries that depict events in Mississippi from the Jim Crow era through 1976. The main installation is a 30-foot-tall light sculpture suspended over the central gallery. It produces a light show and plays the freedom songs “This Little Light of Mine” and “Ain’t Gonna let Nobody Turn Me Around.”
It also responds to people walking below as though they are adding another light to the Civil Rights movement, says Steven Bressler, executive director of Monadnock Media. “It’s going to be a really cool experience, a transformative experience.”
President Donald Trump’s visit during the opening ceremony was protested by some people, but Bressler says, “The thinking is opening this museum will be about healing.”
We commend those from the Hatfield company who contributed to that.
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Kudos to local officials working to create a Pioneer Valley Mosquito Control district to battle the pesky insects that can carry dangerous diseases.
Among those leading the effort is Gregory Lewis, the public health emergency preparedness planner for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments. “I had to persuade people who are not used to mosquitoes being part of public health emergency work that mosquitoes belong in that category.”
The biggest threat in Massachusetts is West Nile virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis.
Organizers hope the Pioneer Valley will join 11 other mosquito control districts in the state by the spring, allowing access to the only mosquito-testing laboratory in the state, egg-killing larvicides, educational resources and a coordinated effort at communication and assessing risk.
Those would be welcome tools to help individual communities combat the health threat posed by mosquitoes.