Holy Fools

Nourishment is one of our most primal routes to feeling safe. It's pre-verbal — it goes back to nursing. So the first meal is deliberately abundant: everyone learns in their body that there will be enough. A snack station stays stocked between meals. Nobody needs to scrounge.

Guests with complex diets come talk to us. We hear them out, ask what works, and hold reasonable boundaries — care without a made-to-order kitchen.

For facilitators, this is the quiet gift: participants arrive at your sessions nourished, grounded, and ready. The kitchen holds the room between your programming, so meals are a continuation rather than a distraction.

And yes — we cook meat. Retreat food tends to assume vegetarian by default; ours doesn't have to. Real meat, cooked well, on menus where the vegan at the table eats with the same care — never the afterthought plate.

We approach every meal as an offering. Field kitchens are chaos; we can't tune every variable like a Michelin star restaurant… and we don't try. Recipes guide the shopping, then we listen — to the dish, to the room, to intuition about who should make which thing.

We consciously choose joy, and joy doesn't exclude stress or sadness; it welcomes them. This kitchen cooks with what's real, moment to moment.

And the kitchen is part of the retreat, not a service running behind it. Our crew is introduced on day one and often joins the room — for morning practice or whole sessions where schedules and content allow — instead of working anonymously behind a closed door. When the program calls for it, participants take a shift with us; an hour of chopping in good company weaves belonging, purpose, and presence. Why we work this way →

Holy Fools grew out of a question: what would it be like to approach service from a state of play? Coco and Enki first chased it in 2022 at Rhythm Wave, a 5Rhythms camp at Burning Man, laughing through dust storms and hungover volunteers while churning out food nobody expected from a dance camp. At Firelight Festival the answer took shape: joy as a practice, every meal as an offering, and a kitchen where anyone who picks up a knife belongs.