Join Lindsey Dorr-Niro and Marty McConnell for a three-night retreat designed to allow you to settle your spirit, find refuge in community, and explore how we can use curiosity to navigate uncertainty in our lives and worlds.

This retreat will ignite your sense of possibility, curiosity, and WONDER through guided meditation, tarot discovery, reflective writing, and tactile imaginative practices. Each day includes three professionally and lovingly prepared locally sourced meals, a balanced array of structured activities and solo reflection time, and an after-dinner bonfire. 

Questions we’ll explore: How can we connect deeply with ourselves, and with each other? How can we resource ourselves so that we can resource our communities? How can a sense of curiosity and wonder bolster and guide us as we move through periods of transition and uncertainty?

Things we believe: Without curiosity there is no space for empathy. Without space for empathy, there is no room to move, to evolve, to connect. Without connection, there is no hope. Hope, curiosity, and inquiry are distinct threats to systems of oppression. This makes wondering a necessary and revolutionary act.

This retreat is an opportunity to spend three days in caring community with people united in a shared purpose: to engage more deeply with the incredible gift that is our lives, and in that way move more powerfully through a world that so badly needs us here, needs us loving ourselves and each other, needs us capable and awake and alive. No experience with meditation, tarot, or writing is required! We’ll walk you through it every step of the way.

We’ll quiet our minds and expand our field of thought.

We’ll draw on intuition to explore vast and vibrant possibilities.

We’ll use gentle inquiry to get beneath the surface and imagine new paths forward.

We’ll get our hands dirty and make ephemeral art that comes from and returns to the land.

Among all of that, we will rest. We will connect with ourselves, each other, and the land. We will wander, wonder, and let ourselves be fed by the trees and fields, locally sourced food, and caring community.
Come wonder with us. Your life deserves it.

WONDER•ING is co-designed and co-led by Lindsey Dorr-Niro (transdisciplinary visual  artist, arts educator, and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholar/teacher) and Marty McConnell (writer, arts educator, and creativity coach). 

Lindsey Dorr-Niro is a transdisciplinary artist and educator. She received her MFA from The Yale School of Art and BFA from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has studied and practiced within the Gelugpa school of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism since 2009 and taught meditation since  completing her 300-hour yoga teacher training with the Yoga Studies Institute in 2011. Her meditation studies include work with the Diamond Mountain, Tara Mandala, and DharmaOcean lineages. Her focus is on somatically embodied practice, with trainings cultivated through Awakening the Body, Awakening the Heart, and The Somatic Practice of  Pure Awareness. She is currently studying with Ralph De La Rosa, whose work bridges Tibetan Buddhist meditation/mindfulness practice with Internal Family Systems, attachment theory, and somatic experiencing to address and heal trauma. 

Marty McConnell provides vital coaching and consulting services to people and organizations, supporting them in being planful, proactive, and powerful in building the lives and worlds they envision. She is the author of when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there, winner of the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize; her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award and Lambda Literary Awards. She is the author Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop (Yes Yes Books, 2018), and the co-creator and co-editor of underbelly, a web site focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. In her work with organizations, groups, and individuals, she utilizes an inquiry-based approach grounded in curiosity, a somatic approach to intuition, and an unshakeable belief that the answers we seek lie within our brilliant ultimate selves.