A Ritual Arts Immersion

facilitated by Melissa Word & Nico Wolf

Online in October 2025
+
Plus optional in-person residency
November 9-15th in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Accompanied by Bayo Akomolafe, Aerin Dunford, Pat McCabe, Kimberly Johnson, Stephen Jenkinson, Narinder Bazen, Naomi Lewis, Gavin Bernard & Chiara Giovando.

Eye of the Needle is an online immersion and six-day creative residency in the wilds of New Mexico’s high desert.

We bring together artists, grief tenders, death workers and dreamers to be with the teachings of rupture and repair through fiber arts practice, embodied making, dream ceremony, seership, land-listening, and improvisational quilting.

We become both undertakers of a dying overculture and midwives of future stories—letting the inner artist and mystic guide us at the threshold between rot and the emergent world blooming through us.

Creative making is a devotional act.

It’s not about outcomes, or measuring up, or passing a test of ‘good art’.

To make beauty with your hands is your essential human inheritance. It’s how we compost the density of living. It’s how we know ourselves, and know our place in the exquisite web of All Things.

Eye of the Needle is an invitation to restore the frayed threads of making and belonging.

We approach art-making as spiritual resuscitation, recovering the severed connection to the Earth, to our bodies, to our expression, to Spirit, to one another.

Together we will create a large-scale community quilt.

Each of our efforts and stories assembled into the patchwork.

Many hands stitching, cutting, ripping, mending—trading our personal agendas for the co-created and emergent vision unfolding between us.

Community quilt as a benediction for these severe and initiatory times.

Our journey begins online, where we metabolize personal grief and turbulence through improvisational quilting and ceremonial dream work.

Foundational stitching and intuitive patchwork techniques are paired with somatic attunement, dreaming and seership practices. Guest speakers join our virtual sewing circles to deposit the magic of their lived experience in casual conversation and spontaneous, inspired flow.

Our optional in-person creative residency offers deep time with cloth, body, and land—

Unraveling together, and co-creating the large-scale community quilt that becomes both the heart of this offering and the dreaming fort for collective practices, storytelling and performances.

<<< I think this is where the imagery for the quilt fort goes >>>>

Pretend you are seven years old again, light and unburdened, sleeping under the people’s quilt of many colors.

The messages of Dream arrive to instruct you.

Grief, the desire of bodies for what is lost, needs gratitude to be fully itself. And gratitude only knows itself through a sense of what it might lose. Together they are the rhythm of things, the silence and the drumbeat that give birth to everything…written into the fabric of possibility.

- Bayo Akomolafe

This course takes place first online over the course of a month, then in person for a week-long residency in Santa Fe, NM.

Choose between online immersion only, or online + in-person residency

For our in-person module, we’ll gather for a 6 night-7 day fully residential artist retreat to engage with healing practices, learn fiber arts techniques and hold group ceremony.

We conclude with a group gallery show of our co-created large-scale community quilt, installed as a giant tent to become both the heart of this offering and the dreaming and storytelling grounds for a collectively sourced re-creation myth.

Our coursework includes:

  • Personal and Collective Grief Work

  • Fiber arts skill building in sewing & quilting

  • Ritual Dreamwork & Social Dreaming

  • Dream Weaving

  • Art-based Ritual Practice

  • Land Listening

  • Ancestral Work

  • Gnosis/Working body as guide

  • Nervous system tending

  • Somatics, Embodiment and Movement practices

  • Integrating our insights, healing gifts and shifts in worldview through written and spoken word and ritual craft making.

  • Working with the Healing Story & The Re-Creation Myth

  • Curation of a gallery show and offering of immersive community ceremony (Retreat only)

APPLY HERE TO JOIN US

Opening Ceremony Deep-Dive

<< Online >>

October 10-12

Friday 10.10 — 9-11 am MT

Saturday 10.11— 9-2pm MT

Sunday 10.12— 9-11am MT

Plus Wednesdays + Sundays throughout October

We meet for ritual practice, and Guest Speaker-accompanied sewing circles and group discussion

(detailed calendar below)

Creative Residency + Retreat

<< Santa Fe, New Mexico >>

November 9-16

Go deeper into the work with an intimate cohort of 12-18 people. Held by the staggering beauty of New Mexico’s high desert…

About your guides:

  • Nico Wolf (Nicole Haciba Burke) is a healing practitioner, trans-disciplinary artist, writer, guide and facilitator of dreamwork, ceremony, embodiment practices, Earth wisdom ways and animistic-based healing work. Her work incites rebellion against the status quo and invites fellow humans toward endless curiosity, courageous authenticity, compassion, and connectivity.

    For 10 years, Nico and her husband Ryan stewarded Golden Well Sanctuary - a retreat and regenerative farm in central Vermont devoted to re-potentiating our relationship with the living Earth through cultivating deeper and more meaningful connections between Nature, Spirit, Self and Community. After selling their farm in 2021, the couple moved to Brooklyn, NY for a year where they transitioned their work to School of Liminal Arts - a platform to house not only their offerings, but to expand into more creative collaborations. They explored Europe for a year and have recently returned to New Mexico where they plan to settle for a while.

    Born in Hong Kong to a Moroccan/Algerian mother and an Irish/Polish/American father, Nico’s work is influenced by a life of multiculturalism, travel, adventure and seeking new perspectives. In addition to nearly two decades in the healing arts, her experiences range from artist and fashion designer to beekeeper, organic farmer and ceremonialist. Nico has undertaken several formal apprenticeships in Japanese medicine and acupressure, Classical Shamanism, and Shamanic practice based on the wisdom of the serpent and the honeybee.

    Nico’s diverse background and multi-faceted worldview has inspired her to create spaces that elicit a deep sense of anything-goes-ness, belonging and freedom where the full palate of human expression and creative impulse comes to the surface. Through her group and private sessions, she ushers participants towards the transformation that can occur when finding oneself in unexpected and non-dual realities.

    More info: nicogoldenwolf.com

  • Accompanied by Melissa Word.

    Melissa is a textile collage artist, dancer, movement guide, grief and death doula, and writer.

    As a facilitator, she helps people heal their creative lives and explore their relationship to their bodies, expression and mortality. 

    Her background as a professional dancer informs how she shapes experiences for others to get more in touch with their own way of moving, and influences her textile-based art studio practice. Working with fabric and thread is its own kind of choreography. The materials have an aliveness that want to be expressed through movement, play, cutting up and mending.

    As a creative grief coach, she leads a seasonal online workshop for grief processing through quilting and hand-sewing--reimagining healing spaces as ones where our bodies, hands, and intuitive impulses guide the way.

    More info about Melissa can be found at: melissaword.com

Nico Wolf and Melissa Word are artists, ritualists, and cultural midwives devoted to the work of weaving beauty, grief, and visionary myth into embodied practice. Together, they hold ceremonial spaces that blur the lines between art-making and world-building, stitching together ancestral memory, somatic wisdom, and a deep reverence for the Unseen.

Nico is a dreamworker, seer, and founder of the School of Liminal Arts—known for her animist teachings and mythic approach to cultural repair. Melissa is a somatic movement practitioner, death doula, and performance artist who tends thresholds through embodied presence and grief ritual. Their collaboration is rooted in deep friendship, shared reverence for land-based practice, and a belief in the power of communal art as a vessel for transformation.

Through our work…

Who we’re weaving with…

Báyò Akómoláfé
Writer / Speaker / Public intellectual / TEN founder

  • Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. But when he takes himself less seriously, he is a father to Alethea and Kyah, and the grateful life-partner to Ej as well as the sworn washer of nightly archives of dishes. Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.” Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent. In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.

  • www.bayoakomolafe.net and www.emergencenetwork.org

Aerin Dunford
Lead Weaver at TEN / Writer / Artist

  • Aerin is the Lead Weaver at ten (@the_emergence_network ) working to cultivate the ground for experiments and practice around the notion of postactivism and asking poignant questions about the way that human response to the crises we face often reproduce the very conditions that have led to those crises. Since the death and stillbirth of her son in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together; learn more about her griefwork on her personal blog, In the Name of Rafa.

  • www.emergencenetwork.org

Gavin Bernard
Artist / Quilter / Designer / Educator

  • Gavin Bernard is an artist, educator, designer and performer living in Atlanta, GA. Born in Great Britain, he has made Atlanta his home and creative headquarters since 1998. His work focuses on site-specific installations for both commercial design clients and in his art practice.

    Bernard's current body of work focuses on reclaimed textiles and improvisational quilting, inspired by the legacy of Southern Black quilters. Bernard reinterprets quilts as portals to dream states, where rest, beauty, and intimacy converge to transport us to new, visionary worlds. He is currently a fellow with Midtown Heart of the Arts. As an artist and educator, his work has been presented by The Airport Art Program at Hartsfield Jackson Airport, Spruill Gallery, The Creatives Project, Wanted Design, Dashboard, Atlanta Beltline, Modern Atlanta, SXSW EDU, and The Goat Farm.

  • @gavincbernard

Stephen Jenkinson
Culture activist, worker, author

Naomi Lewis
Facilitator / Artist / Animist / Ceremonialist

  • Naomi Lewis has been facilitating animistic practice for 20 years. Working both in the UK and abroad she is committed to creating freedom-scapes for everyone and lab spaces for creatives, including actors, dancers, writers and directors seeking an Earth-based expansion in their work. Her ethic is centred around helping participants be in service to nature and the planet, stepping outside singularity into a collective experience, where we remember we are part of the art of the whole. She enjoys creating irreverently reverent spaces of deep exploration and journeying, punctuated by mindful foolishness and connection.

  • https://www.studiohermih.com

Narinder Bazen
Founder Nine Keys School of Death Arts / Artist

  • Narinder Bazen serves in these curious times as a Death Midwife, Home Funeral Educator and Holistic Death Care Activist. She has worked with over a hundred individuals and/or families as a death midwife and home funeral educator. She is NEDA proficient and National Home Funeral Alliance proficient.

    Through her Death Education classes in Atlanta and via virtual classrooms she’s taught hundreds of individuals everything they need to know about Dying in America. She is passionate about Death Education.

    In 2018, she created the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship where she trains others who are called to holistic death work and would like to walk with her for a little while to get there. Narinder is also an artist and a dog mom to little Oak.

  • https://www.narinderbazen.com

Kimberly Johnson
Somatic Practitioner & Author

Pat McCabe
Activist / Artist / Writer, Ceremonialist & Speaker

  • Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. She is a voice for global peace, and her paintings are created as tools for individual, earth and global healing. She draws upon the Indigenous sciences of Thriving Life to reframe questions about sustainability and balance, and she is devoted to supporting the next generations, Women’s Nation and Men’s Nation, in being functional members of the “Hoop of Life” and upholding the honor of being human.

  • https://www.patmccabe.net/

Chiara Giovando
Founder of ICA / Artist / Curator

  • Chiara Giovando is an artist and curator. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her BFA studies and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Based in experimental music practices her work includes installation, performance and film. Giovando works with sound as a material, creating sculptural instances of sound that activate and disrupt psychoacoustic perception. Her films include, Proud Flesh (2008), This Love (2010), Archaic Smile (2011). She was Curator in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland OR, and led a full programatic year titled Sound is Matter, she was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A., where she organized several exhibitions of newly commissioned works. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated the exhibition Hammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included 14 artists and composers as well as archival material. She curated an exhibition of new sound art in Los Angeles titled, The Third Ear, as part of Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curator’s Lab Award. She was creator of the Sound Structures series in San Francisco that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to new graphic scores. In 2014 she founded Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program in Joshua Tree, CA.Giovando has performed both nationally and internationally.

  • https://icasantafe.org and http://chiaragiovando.com

Our home for the week will be…

An Oasis in the Desert

Set in Northern New Mexico’s high desert, this retreat offers a private, creative sanctuary surrounded by 43 acres of mesa, forest, and flowing water. Designed with natural materials and simple elegance, the space includes adobe-style casitas, a communal barn, meditation paths, orchards, and gathering places like a yoga deck, fire circle, and stargazing platform.

With both modern amenities and analog studios, it supports artists, facilitators, and visionaries in slowing down, reconnecting with the land, and creating in rhythm with the desert’s vast light and silence.

We’ll be a short drive from historic Ghost Ranch, a little over an hour from Taos and from downtown Santa Fe. Should you choose to explore the area after or before our course, nearby day trips include natural hot springs, plenty of hiking and historic sites (we’re happy to make recommendations).

The closest airports are Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Denver, CO. It tends to be cheapest to fly into ABQ and Denver than to Santa Fe. There is cheap and easy public transport from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and we’re happy to arrange carpools or pick ups from town. Please reach out if you need help making travel arrangements.

The Exchange:

Pricing is as follows…

2600

2780

3020

3500

This includes instruction for all three modules, plus a week long residential retreat with lodging, 3 chef prepared meals per day, and inclusion in a group show in an esteemed gallery in Santa Fe.

Need-based sliding scale available, inquire on your application.

Spots are limited, early registration recommended.

All genders welcome.

Why Dream?

During these times of great turmoil, when politicians are failing us and societal structures are crumbling, we turn to Dream as our North Star. We navigate these wayward times by becoming vessels of the boundless creativity and possibility that moves through Dream.

Dream can (and has been know to) shift tides. It is not irrelevant that, throughout history, Dream has brought us scientific breakthrough, influential music, theater, writing; it has been known that the artists, the visionaries, the Dreamers are the ones that affect societal fabric in ways that bring real and lasting change.

In this sacred container, we call to the genius that can and will arrive through Dream so that it might be offered up as sacrament; so that any form arising from Dream becomes the shared sustenance that feeds connectivity and right relationship with the All that Is.

Coming to this work asks that you show up in ways that leave the ego and personal agenda behind in order to immerse fully into the collective, collaborative, world-changing potential of Dream. We will cease to own the material of our Dreams and instead offer up our Dreaming bodies as vessels for change.

This work is revolutionary and will stretch you. It will ask for your complete devotion and courage. It will honor and give space for both the absurd and the sanctity of Dream as medicine for these times.


Pricing:

Online Only

Early Bird: (before 10.19?)

$ 440

Online + Retreat

Early Bird: (before 10.19?)

Shared Room: $ 2500

Private Room: $2900

Payment Plans are available for both online immersion and in-person residency

Limited number of scholarships + work trade opportunities for the retreat are also available.

For Scholarships -

For work trade, email -

General FAQ:

  • Both - this is a choose your own adventure experience. You will learn techniques for both the machine and hand-sewing. This, however, is NOT a class where you will learn to use your sewing machine if you have never used one. Students will choose a project to make based on examples given in class, and receive instruction and guidance to support their process.

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description

Retreat FAQ:

  • The closest airport is in Santa Fe, NM which is about 1.5 hours away by car. Cheaper flights can be found into Albuquerque (2.5 hour drive) or Denver (4.5 hour drive). There are many campsites and hotsprings to visit along the way from each airport in case you’d like to make a stop. We are also happy to help you make travel plans including arranging carpools from airports. Just reach out.

  • The weather in NM typically ranges from 28-65 degrees in November. The sun warms up our day and the nights can be chilly. It’s generally dry and bright with some chance of rain here and there.

  • Besides putting lots of love, time and energy into organizing our retreats, we also have to make non-refundable deposits of our own in advance to make these events happen.

    Please note that your deposit is non-refundable. The balance of your payment is due within 30 days of the retreat. If that is not paid on time, we reserve the right to open your spot up to another participant.

    If you cancel up to 60 days prior to the retreat start, you will receive a full refund for anything paid beyond your deposit. If you cancel up to 31 days prior to the start of the retreat, you will not receive a refund but instead will receive full credit, towards any other program School of Liminal Arts is hosting in the same calendar year.

    No refunds or credits will be given within 30 days of the retreat or if you do not show up for any reason or choose to leave early for any reason.

    In the unlikely event that we cancel an event, you’ll be refunded in full. We are not responsible for travel costs.

    We highly recommend purchasing travel insurance.

  • • Warm and cool clothing options that are easy to move in

    • Walking shoes and/or hiking shoes with good ankle support if you plan to hike

    • Flashlight

    • Toiletries

    • Notebook and pen

    • Insect repellent and sunscreen

    • Bathing suit , river shoes and swimming towel if you wish to dip in the river

    • Slippers or indoor shoes if you need them (no shoes are allowed in most meeting spaces)

  • If you’re coming from lower altitude, expect a couple of days to adjust to being at high altitude - meaning you might be a bit tired when you first arrive. Abiquiú is 6194 feet above sea level. There are things you can do to prepare and help your body adjust including using chlorophyll extract. Check with a trusted naturopath for tips and dosage. Drinking plenty of water and being sure you have a good mineral balance is also helpful.

  • We’ll have a blend of active participation, time to socialize and time to rest. We’ll be spending a lot of time outdoors as well. Our days will start at 9am and go as late as 9pm with midday breaks to replenish. Expect a more detailed schedule closer to the retreat.

  • We’ve hired a local chef to prepare vegetarian food with options available for gluten and dairy intolerance. If you have special dietary needs beyond this, please reach out. You’re welcome to bring what you need to be nourished but we cannot accommodate all dietary restrictions.

  • No problem, we got you and will meet you where you’re at.

  • Nope. We’ll be entering into altered states through breath, movement, sound and liminal arts practices. We will reserve the right to ask you to leave should you breach this policy.

  • We suggest you plan an extra day or two before or after the retreat to check out local hot springs. There are several natural ones close proximity to the retreat. We may even decide to go as a group one of the days we’ll be gathering. TBD.

  • We have 2 partial, work trade scholarships available, first come first serve. Email Nico to ask. We’re also offering payment plans in addition to Afterpay.

  • There are loads of airbnbs and hotels in the surrounding area. If you’d like to be connected with other attendees to play car shares and shared accommodations or side trips before or after the retreat, reach out, we’ll connect you.