Nine Keys & Co: the art, soft-business, activism, and mystery of death work

Find Madrid-based death worker and Mourning Artist Paula Hernando’s grief dolls on Instagram @doulas_project. And her death work performances and drawings on Instagram at @murnanaz.

In this episode, Narinder sits down with death worker and Mourning Artist Paula Hernando to explore her work of alchemizing

grief into form. Paula’s “Doula Project” offers bespoke dolls that carry the stories of loss. Each one is a vessel, each one is a witness. Together, they

discuss the reclamation of the plañidera (the mourning woman), the need for new death and grief conversations in Madrid, and how art becomes both death work

and culture work: an act of remembering, restoring, and remaking the world through mourning.

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In this episode of Nine Keys, Narinder speaks with grief worker Abby Goelzer about her upcoming offering Midwestern Daughter — an exploration of what happens when cultural niceness meets real grief. Together, they unpack the Midwestern Daughter Archetype: the one raised to be kind before honest, the one who carries grief with a polite smile.

Their conversation moves through tenderness, agency, and the quiet rebellion of telling the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

To find out how to join Midwestern Daughter go to Abby's website Garnet and the Moon or her IG account @Garnet_andthe_Moon

Before the conversation, Narinder shares a brief note about Dead of Winter, a four-month art and death salon designed by Narinder and death arts worker Meghan Johnson, as a soft, creative respite for the darker months ahead. With prompts, artist-inspired process sharing, and room to rest, Dead of Winter offers a place to land when the world feels heavy.

A grounded and intimate episode about grief, art, and the undoing of politeness in favor of something more real.

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In this episode, Narinder shares a story of an angel and hergolden oil, running water, and the unexpected path from childcare into the sacred work of death midwifery. She speaks candidly about living with chronic illness, the shame death workers often carry around charging for care, and the survival necessity of solopreneurship. Narinder explores how art making in Nine Keys keeps death work alive, stretching imagination, pushing the edges of practice, and offering new ways to sustain ourselves without burning out.

Threaded through the conversation is her prayer-song, an invocation to Great Mother, Good Ancestors, and Earth herself, that opens and closes the episode as a reminder of why we labor, why we serve, and why our sustenance matters.

This episode also connects to the upcoming gathering Dead of Winter, where Narinder and other artists weave together death, art, and mysticism during the darkest months of the year.

Oh, Great Mother give me the desire to do your work

I am your hands. I am your ears. I am your mouth. I am your feet.

I am peace. I’ll do my chores; I’ll do my chores for peace. 

Oh, Good Ancestors, guide me home, for as long as I live.

Meet my needs, and a little more, so that I may give.

Oh, Earth, hear my love and my sorrows for what we’ve done

and know I will tend this little patch, this little land,

where my feet firmly stand doing chores for peace.

Oh, Great Mother give me the desire for work you’d have me do.

And when my day come to rest, I’ll come home to you.

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In this episode, Narinder sits down with Melissa Word (co-creator of Eye of the Needle) for another deep conversation. They explore what it means to gather right now in threshold spaces, - beginning at the sacred springs, moving through the urgent necessity of collective dreaming, art-making, and ritual. They also talk about how Eye of the Needle has evolved, who is invited, who is presenting, what magic is to come.

About Eye of the Needle: Ritual Arts Immersion

• What it is: A hybrid ritual arts immersion, weaving together online sessions + an optional in-person (residency) gathering. It’s designed for artists, grief tenders, death workers, visionaries, and dreamers. Through embodied making, cloth & fiber art, dream ceremony, land listening, improvisational quilting, somatic practices, seership and ceremony, the gathering aims to help us tend rupture, repair, and belonging.

• Dates & Format:
• Online portion: October 2025. (Exact online dates: October 10, 2025, 2:00 PM through October 12, 2025, 5:00 PM)
•  In-person Residency: November 9-15, 2025 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

• Facilitators / Guest Presenters / Artists:
• The immersion is facilitated by Melissa Word & Nico Wolf.

• Guest presenters include:
• Bayo Akomolafe 
• Aerin Dunford 
• Pat McCabe 
• Kimberly Johnson 
• Stephen Jenkinson 
• Narinder Bazen
• Naomi Lewis
• Gavin Bernard
• Chiara Giovando

• What participants will do/receive:
• Online: work with grief, personal life density, dream ceremonies, foundational cloth/fiber art techniques, intuitive patchwork and stitching, somatic attunement, sewing circles with guest-speakers etc.
• In-person: deep time in the high desert of New Mexico, land-listening, co-creating a large community quilt (story & cloth combined), performance, cloth & body work, ceremony & ritual practices, honoring ancestral relationality, the more-than-human etc. 

• Why this matters now: As Melissa & team frame it, this is a time of rupture, disconnection, and grief—but also emergence. The immersion asks participants to be both the undertakers of what’s dying (the overculture, inherited broken patterns) and midwives of what may come next. It’s about repairing belonging: with Earth, with self, with ancestors, with the unseen, with art as devotional practice. 

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In this special episode, Narinder invites listeners into a threshold moment: the renaming of Nine Keys from the Death Midwifery Apprenticeship to the Nine Keys School of Death Arts.

Recorded during Still,Life the online opening reception and gallery night on September 7th, Narinder is joined in conversation by her friend and fellow death worker and artist, Melissa Word. Together, they explore how Nine Keys is not simply a training program, but a living conceptual art piece, one that blends ritual and practice, pedagogy and imagination, grief literacy and cultural midwifery.

Narinder shares why the new name finally feels correct for her, and how the School of Death Arts is not only for artists, but for anyone who wants to do death work in a creative, regenerative, and culture-shifting way.

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In this episode of the Nine Keys podcast, Narinder sits down with creator and visionary Dajé Aloh to crack open what it means for the soul to have its own momentum when it’s rooted in the radical aliveness of Earth herself.

We start with a passage Dajé wrote about soil, pollinators, and the magnetics of life-force, then tumble into conversation about the power of delight as resistance.

This is a conversation about listening to what your soul wants, not as some fluffy affirmation, but as straight-up punk rebellion in a culture that thrives on disconnection.

We talk compost, joy, hot wings, and sacred springs, and what it takes to let your roots grow deep enough to feed not only yourself, but the worlds around you

Check out Dajé's work at:

https://storywork.studio/

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In this episode of the Nine Keys Podcast, Narinder is joined by fellow death artist, Meghan Allynn Johnson of Madison Death Studio.

Their conversation follows the flow of water - they explore death work as a force, art as a force, and the unruly magic that happens when those currents meet. They speak to the ways death arts keep pressing the edges of what this work can be, and how The Death Healer’s Hexagon holds death workers in that creative force, not controlling it, but honoring and shaping with it.

You’ll hear Meghan share her transition from Madison Death Collective into Madison Death Studio, and Narinder share her shift as Nine Keys unfolds into the School of Death Arts. Along the way, they touch on death arts theory / artist identity / and death work as a path of devotion.

✨ Mark your calendar: on September 7th Narinder is hosting Still, Life, an online opening reception for this next phase of Nine Keys.

RSVP for Still, Life here.

And a little sneak peek… Meghan and Narinder are already dreaming together about bringing Dead of Winter back around this cold and dark season. Stay tuned...it’s coming. ❄️

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Beneath the asphalt, the springs of life are flowing. Her waters press against the gates we’ve been told to guard, our gifts, our art, our soul’s work.

In this episode, a sermon by the spring water, Narinder rides the first wave of a great soul shift, where the pendulum between masculine and feminine swings wildly enough to break its hinge. She speaks of the feminine rising and the Great Mother’s spiral ways of work. Where 'new world' building is bubbling up through our uncapped souls.

Along the way, she lifts up the work of Ayana Zaire Cotton and Daje Aloh—visionaries who tend the thresholds between art, story, and liberation.

This is an invitation to tear down the fences, to let your own well flow without dam or lock, and to run, full-hearted and unafraid, to the places that will keep it flowing.

 Narinder’s Reimagine package is one such place, a living structure built to help you shape your death work, your healing arts so that magic and money can move together like a current.

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Narinder lets the wind have her presently - thistledown, unscripted, carried by the Great Mystery and the hands of her ancestors.

Death workers are always holding : space, others, steady - What happens when the death worker un-holds?

Here, Narinder's flower in the morning. A spring in Merriweather County. A miracle older than bone dust. Stories to inspire you.

This episode is for you if you’ve been pretending you don’t feel the pull - The dead working through you.

The whispers aren’t going away. Maybe it’s time to follow them.

Episode dedicated to Jon Gottsegen, Ace Amerson, Deryn Helleborus, Sarah Price, and Narinder's Ancestors and Apprentices

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Misha Murphy of Hafez Death Care and the podcast Halva for the Heart joins Narinder for a warm, sharp, and deeply human conversation. A Nine Keys alum, Misha’s grief work centers Iranians in the diaspora, holding space for inherited griefs, ancestral wounds, and love stretched across time zones. Though Misha currently lives in Seoul, they serve globally.

This isn’t just a somber sit-down. Misha moves between devotion and levity with rare grace, talking straight, laughing easily, and naming the magic of grief care without flinching.

Together, mentor and mentee share stories about working with goddesses and ancestors, the quiet power of tending to the dead, and the fierce, sometimes funny tenderness required to keep showing up for this work.

This episode is as much about the doing of death work as it is about the love and grit it takes to stay devoted to it.

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