EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A Ritual Arts Immersion
With Melissa Word & Nico Wolf
& Guest Presenters
Online in October
plus optional in person residency
November 9-15th, in Santa Fe, NM
EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A Ritual Arts Immersion
With Melissa Word & Nico Wolf
& Guest Presenters
Online in October
In-person residency
November 9-15th, in Santa Fe, NM
A Ritual Arts Immersion
with Melissa Word & Nico Wolf
& Guest Presenters
Online in October
In-person residency
November 9-15th in Santa Fe, New Mexico
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, visionaries, grief tenders, 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 unknowable, emergent world blooming through us.
Eye of the Needle is a ritual arts immersion woven across online and in-person experiences, culminating in a six-day creative residency in the wilds of New Mexico’s high desert.
This gathering of visionaries, artists, grief tenders, and dreamers invites participants to become both undertakers of a dying overculture and midwives of future stories—through the teachings of rupture and reunion and the living practices of fiber arts, embodied making, dream ceremony, seership, land-listening, and improvisational quilting.
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 prerogative. It’s how we know ourselves, it’s how we know our place in the exquisite web of Spirit.
We come together to restore the frayed threads of belonging. We unstitch the inherited patterns of severed connection - to the Land, to Spirit, to each other - and let new ways of being unfurl, guided by the Unseen.
Our journey begins online, where we metabolize personal grief and life-density through creative practice and ceremonial dream work.
Foundational stitching and quilting techniques are paired with somatic attunement, dreaming practices, and ( ).
Guest speakers join our virtual sewing circles to deposit the magic of their lived experience in casual conversation and spontaneous, inspired flow.
The in-person residency offers deep time with cloth, body, and land-
unraveling together, and co-creating a large-scale community quilt that becomes both the heart of this offering and the dreaming grounds for a collectively sourced re-creation myth.
Together, we honor creative process as a devotional act—not solely of self-expression, but of reweaving the frayed threads of belonging. As inherited patterns are unstitched, something more attuned to the web of life may emerge—guided by Spirit, ancestral presence, and the Unseen.
Our shared journey begins online, where each participant’s thread of story is offered to the loom of collective practice. Foundational stitching techniques are paired with somatic attunement and dreamwork, while guest speakers join our virtual sewing circles—bringing insight, inspiration, and new colors and textures to the weave.
The in-person residency offers deep time with cloth, body, and land—unraveling, remaking, and co-creating a large-scale community quilt that becomes both the heart of this offering and the dreaming grounds for a collectively sourced re-creation myth. Each day includes hands-on making, grief rituals, somatic practice, ceremony, seership practice, dreamwork, and storytelling circles that honor personal lineages, ancestral relationality (past and future), and tend to and celebrate the repair of our intricate kinship with each other and the more-than-human world.
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
The Structure:
This course takes place first online over the course of a month, then in person for a week-long immersion in Santa Fe, NM.
For our in-person module, we’ll gather for a 6 night, 7 day fully residential artist in residency immersion to engage with healing practices, learn fiber arts techniques and hold group ceremony.
We will conclude with a group gallery show of our co-created large-scale community quilt that will be 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
Part I (Online Dates):
Part II (In Person Dates):
About your guides:
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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
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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.
Who we’re weaving with…
Báyò Akómoláfé
Writer / Speaker / Public intellectual / TEN founder
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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’.
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Aerin Dunford
Lead Weaver at TEN / Writer / Artist
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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.
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Gavin Bernard
Artist, Quilter, Designer
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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.
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Stephen Jenkinson
Culture activist, worker, author
Narinder Bazen
Founder Nine Keys School of Death Arts / Artist
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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.
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Kimberly Johnson
Somatic Practitioner & Author
Pat McCabe
A
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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.
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Chiara Giovando
Founder of ICA / Artist / Curator
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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.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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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.
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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.
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Besides putting lots of love, time and energy in 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 even that we cancel an event, you’ll be refunded in full. We are not responsible for travel costs.
We highly recommend purchasing travel insurance.
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• 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)
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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. Valdez is at 7,400 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.
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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.
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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.
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No problem, we got you and will meet you where you’re at.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.