Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
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Something worth your attention before we begin.
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This is Decolonizing Time. Today is 1 Q’anil.
Hola Beautiful Wildlings!
This week, a letter came back to me instead of my renewed passport.
My one-page renewal was supposed to be processed in Guadalajara within a few weeks. Somewhere along the line, there was a hiccup, and my application went to the States instead. The US consulate kept saying they would send updates, and then a letter arrived saying there was a hold.
I need that passport for my permanent residency application next month, when my residency expires, so we spent two days on the phone getting a hold lifted so the renewal can move again. The hold came from the IRS dropping the ball back in March, but we only discovered it now. It looks like it will lift soon, but it still feels awful. (Saturn is transiting my twelfth house right now, the house of prisons, and it feels as though my passport is being held hostage.)
In episode one of this podcast I leaned on Achille Mbembe, who writes about modern power as something that governs time as much as territory, h/t to Estelle Ellison for “Foreclosed Time,” about how much time is taken from us by these institutions, and I kept asking questions in that spirit: who waits, who moves, who burns out. This week I’m the one waiting.
The sociologist Javier Auyero did fieldwork in the waiting room of a welfare office in Buenos Aires and called the people there patients of the state, because being made to wait, again and again, is how an institution teaches you where the power sits. I think anyone who has stood in line for papers learns this in the body long before they read it in a book.
The passport itself is a youngin. The identity document as we know it only took its modern shape after the First World War. Sociologist John Torpey traced how nation-states made themselves the owners of what Torpey called “the legitimate means of movement.” Before that, people moved (illegitimately? Fuck that.) across continents for thousands of years on their own feet and their own calendars. I rematriated to my ancestors’ homeland, and I still need a state’s paper to live here.
What I felt on those calls was institutional urgency, the kind that arrives on somebody else’s clock, from an office in another country, while my body does the carrying. The institution makes me wait and makes me hurry at the same time (wait for the update, hurry to produce additional documents), and I know that pairing well, because it was the first urgency I ever learned.
The First Hurry
The first hurry was school. Before I started, I spent most of my days with my abuelita, Grandma Bea, because both my parents owned businesses. Then school began, and I had to learn the clock, and learning it was hard. I’ve talked before about being a Gen X latchkey kid, getting myself to and from school in second grade onward and always running for the bus. I was getting my brother out the door too, every morning, on our own, and I often missed the bus and walked to school late. My mother called me a dilly-dallyer.
The grown-up version of that word is “time blindness,” which people still reach for. I retired it. I call it Time immersion now, which feels more apt to my relationship with Time.
In 1967, the historian E. P. Thompson published an essay called “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” about how whole populations were taught to live by the clock once their hours could be bought and sold. Thompson traced the school as one of the first places that time-discipline reached children, drilling punctuality into them long before anyone paid for their hours, and it reached me there too. School was my first job. In my own taxonomy of colonial time, school is where most of us first meet Divided and Perfected Time: the day cut into periods, each cut marked by a bell, and a grade for keeping up.
Some can even get paid for their grades like I did. After I had dropped out at 15, my dad paid 20 bucks for a straight-A report card when I went back. But I couldn’t stay in the system. I tested out at 16 and left home.
For Indigenous children, the bell came with a weapon behind it. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania in 1879, and its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, summed up the mission in 1892 as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The boarding schools built on that model ran on bells and marching schedules, and the clock was one of the tools of the killing, because rising, eating, working, and sleeping by the bell was how a child got cut away from the rhythms of home. Punctuality has never been neutral.
Tema Okun names a sense of urgency as one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture: the constant pressure that makes it hard to take a moment of time for oneself, to include people, to think long-term. School taught it to me as a virtue, and I was the child in trouble for being late.
That pressure does not stay in the classroom. Byung-Chul Han calls it achievement society, where nobody needs a foreman anymore because we exploit ourselves and experience it as freedom. The bell stops ringing when school ends, and a lot of us keep hearing it for the rest of our lives, in the inbox notifications at nine at night and in the voice that says we should be further along by now. (Turn off notifications, sounds, and badges on your devices. When I hear them in Zoom calls I can tell what runs your life.)
The Clock Had Them First
The inheritance my parents gave me was to follow the clock, and that inheritance came with abandonment, because they were never around. They were entrepreneurs and workaholics, and the clock had them first. My dad was early to everything, suit pressed and shirt starched, and he taught me to iron with military precision and called it impeccability, the protection a successful Brown man needed in a white world. Colonial productivity culture needed both of them at work, and a child learns the clock from the adults it takes away.
Resmaa Menakem, who I trained with, teaches that the body is a historical register, the place where unresolved harm settles when nobody has the room to resolve it. Menakem also teaches that trauma stripped of its context starts to look like personality, and inside a family it starts to look like family traits. That is how inherited urgency works. It is urgency that was never ours, installed by colonial time and passed down through bodies and lineages until the hurry reads as who we are. Menakem’s book is called My Grandmother’s Hands, which brings me to my abuelita’s.
The Sewing Room
It was my abuelita who gave me the ancestral ways, and refuge from the urgency, even during the school year when I went to visit. Her house was where I could get away from all of it. Her house was like the sun, and we all orbited around it. The door was always open, neighbors came and went, and nobody stopped what they were doing when someone arrived. You just merged with what was happening in the house.
Her sewing room was at the back of the house. You went down a hallway to reach it, and the doorway sat at an angle, so getting in felt like a tight, winding tunnel. Inside were stacks of fabric bolts in every style, child-like patterns, fancy grown-up silks and Guatemalan woven textiles hecho a mano.
She traveled the world and came back with textiles from everywhere she went, and some of the silks were ones my father brought home from Osaka during the Vietnam War, for her to sew. You had to watch for pins on the floor with bare feet, and the room smelled like Chanel No 5 and starch. The machine was always humming, glowing under its light and pulling the fabric and us in as it went.
She was always working on something, sometimes for me and sometimes for someone else, and as I got older she taught me to sew and make my own clothes. When she finished a project she hung it on the china cabinet in the living room, so whoever it was for would see it as they walked into the house. It was always magical, whether I was the one lit up by something made for me or the one watching someone else receive her gift, a child’s outfit, doll clothes, or one of the 10 wedding dresses with hand appliqué and beadwork, free of charge that took her months to make.
Once we were inside that room, hours went by and we didn’t even notice. We were so immersed in what we were doing that Time just disappeared. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who gave Flow its name in psychology, described it as a state in which people are “so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter,” and counted the transformation of Time among its marks, hours passing like minutes.
That room is where I first noticed how Flow worked, and where the Time immersion I talk about now became real to me. The dilly-dallyer at the bus stop and the child in Flow at the back of my abuelita’s house were the same child, which is what Kelly Diels {link} means by “Everything that was used against you can be your source of power.”
Thompson had a name for the Time in that room, too: task-orientation, where work is measured by what the task needs instead of by the hours on the clock, and a piece is finished when it is finished. To anyone “accustomed to labour timed by the clock,” Thompson wrote, that way of working “appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency,” which is a fair description of how a dilly-dallyer looks from the bus stop.
That older time held on longest in the home, in women’s work, and Thompson, who had already described seaport people who “attend the tides,” wrote that the mother of young children “attends to other human tides.” My abuelita kept that Time at a humming machine, in a magical room you reached through a tunnel, and when the work was done it went up on the china cabinet for everyone to see.
Silvia Federici shows why that Time survived in the home when it was driven out of almost everywhere else. As capitalism took hold, the work of making and caring for people was pushed outside the wage and treated as nature instead of labor, so nobody bothered to put a clock on it. My colonial time taxonomy names this Gender-Extracted Time. The gifts on my abuelita’s china cabinet came out of those uncounted hours, made at the speed of the work and given away.
The Thread of Time
I have written before that weaving is a Time practice, and I mean that literally: “The warp stretches from now into the future, while the weft interlaces the present and the past.” The Guatemalan textiles in that room carried more than pattern. During the genocide against the Maya in Guatemala in the 1980s, weavers used huipil patterns to carry messages in plain sight, past people who could see the cloth and could not read it. In the Cholq’ij, the sacred count of 260 days that Maya daykeepers still keep, B’atz’ is the thread of Time, and the count names each day by what it carries instead of by the hour. It’s one of the oldest ways of keeping Time on this continent, and it has outlasted five hundred years of bells. This episode goes out on 1 Q’anil, the day of the seed, the first day of a new count of thirteen.
So I grew up between two times. Gloria Anzaldúa took the Nahuatl word Nepantla, the space between two bodies of water, for the place where you are neither this nor that, but are changing, and that is where a child lives who goes from the school bell to the sewing machine and back again. I carry both inheritances now, and I think it matters which line each one came down. One is the clock, which reached me through school and through the parents it took away, and reached me again this week in a letter. The other is the tunnel at the back of my abuelita’s house, where Time moved at the speed of the work and the finished piece hung where everyone could see it.
This Week’s Micro-Refusal
Back in December I wrote about choosing one micro-refusal of colonial time each day, and this week mine is about the passport. I’m not going to let this impediment move me into dysregulation. So much of what these systems teach us is dysregulation, a body kept on alert so the institution can set the pace. Menakem calls the counter-move settling, and a settled body is much harder to rush. The delay is real, the institution caused it, and the fix is theirs to finish, while my nervous system stays mine. I am certain everything will work out. (My bet is that it arrives with about a week left on my residency. lol.)
My body was never a neutral instrument for the clock anyway. I am a sick person who works (I wrote a whole letter about it in April), and disability justice has a name for the Time my body keeps. Alison Kafer calls it crip time: “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” A passport office will not bend its clock for me this month, and I can still refuse to bend my nervous system to it.
People sometimes hear “decolonizing Time” and picture me telling everyone to throw out the calendar and go live in a cave. (I get it. I also have a residency deadline.) I recently commented on a TikTok video. A parent created a nine-grid Harada method for their newly adult son to begin adulting, and the time box had some issues. The vitriol of responses and projections at me from viewers was astounding. The concept of respecting other people's time is so ingrained. We are taught to forego our own capacity limits to meet others'.
It has always been a yes/and: the date is real, and the pace my body keeps around it is mine. Báyò Akómoláfé put it in one sentence: “These times are urgent, let us slow down.”
The Practice
Once this week, find your own sewing room. Choose one thing you make or tend with your hands, put the clock where you can’t see it, and let the work end when the task is finished. Afterward, notice where the hours went, and where in your body the old hurry tried to come back. (of course, cap it at 90-120 minutes to protect your dopamine and capacity.)
Until the passport comes, I’m keeping the other inheritance close, the one that smells like Chanel No. 5 and starch.
Tell me in the comments, because I’d love to read these: when you were a child, where did the hours disappear?
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If this episode stays with you, please give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show.
(🦋 The blue on the podcast cover art is the blue of a morpho butterfly that flew past while I was choosing the color on the equinox.)
P.P.S. Maltiox (mahl-tee-osh) is K’iche’ Maya for deep gratitude and sacred acknowledgment.
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Land Lineage
I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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