Explore every episode of the podcast Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar

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.

I would be ever grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. Email me your screenshot, and I’ll send you a super secret recording of a Befriending Time practice.

Something worth your attention before we begin.

Ancestral Lineage Healing

Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Lineage Healing runs September 28 through December 14, and it is the slow, real work of tending the ones who came before you until they can hold you again. If you register, use my personal code: thrivalist50 for $50 off.

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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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico. All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.

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 f**k. Still cozy in the chaos.

Beautiful Wildling,

I feel like something is off with time. I keep noticing it, and then noticing myself noticing it, like I’m clocking whether I’m the only one.

I don’t mean Time. Not the big thing. Not the ancestral, rhythmic, relational kind. I mean the everyday time we’re supposed to live inside. The clock time. The schedule time. The kind that tells you you’re late, behind, falling short, even when nothing obvious is wrong.

I think most people feel it, even if they don’t talk about it this way. It shows up as disorientation more than panic. Days blur together. Planning feels strange, like it asks for a confidence people don’t actually have right now. The future feels thin. I keep coming back to that word. Thin. Not gone. Just hard to lean on.

I hear people say they feel late all the time. Late to what, they’re not sure. I think that part matters. Tired, even when they’ve rested. Anxious, but not about one clear thing. I feel like there’s this constant background hum of urgency, but no destination attached to it. Just pressure. Just pace.

The clock keeps moving. Of course it does. Meetings still happen. Calendars still fill up. Deadlines still exist. I’m not pretending we’re outside of that. But I think fewer people trust this version of time than they used to. Or maybe they never did, and they’re only starting to notice now.

I feel like something quietly broke in our relationship with Time, and we’ve been blaming ourselves for it.

I think that’s why so many people say things like, “I should be able to handle this,” or “Other people seem fine,” or “Maybe I’m just bad at managing my time.” I hear that a lot. And every time I do, I feel like what they’re actually pointing to isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a mismatch. A tempo problem.

I don’t think this is burnout the way we’re usually told it is. It’s older than that. Structural. Like we’re living inside a pace that stopped making sense, but we’re still being asked to obey it anyway.

And I think that kind of obedience does something to people, slowly.

I don’t think this is a personal failure. It isn’t. I feel protective of that truth.

I say that knowing how early so many of us were trained to feel behind.

I think about this a lot through my own body. I was a Gen X latchkey kid. Second grade. Getting myself to and from school. Watching the clock. Forgetting to watch the clock. Catching the bus. Running for it, actually. Always running for it. Late for the bus. Late to class. Late in that quiet, constant way where I never quite settle, but always feel rushed.

I feel like that did something to my nervous system early on. Trained it to scan. To hurry. To assume I was already behind before I even knew what I was supposed to be ahead of. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think a lot of us learned colonial time as pressure long before we learned it as “normal.”

That’s why I don’t buy the idea that what people are feeling now is just burnout, or poor time management, or individual overwhelm. I feel like those explanations miss how deep this goes. Something got set in motion long before any of us had a chance to opt out.

I keep coming back to modernity and how it taught us to experience time as a straight line instead of a living field. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures) names this so clearly. She talks about modernity as a project that fractures our relationship with time, land, ancestors, and continuity. A project that keeps people in a state of permanent insufficiency. Always behind. Always catching up. Always oriented toward a future that never quite arrives.

I feel that in my body when planning starts to feel impossible. When even imagining a few months ahead carries a subtle sense of failure, as if whatever I choose will already be wrong somehow. Too late somehow.

In that framework, colonial time stops being something you belong to. It becomes something you manage. Something you race. Something you lose.

That’s why, when the official story insists everything is stable while lived experience says otherwise, the rupture doesn’t show up first in data. It quietly shows up in your senses, registering as something else, in physical tension and sleep disturbance. Or that constant low-level alertness people carry. That split does real harm over time.

It erodes trust in the perception of what our bodies are experiencing. Frantz Fanon wrote about this under colonial rule. He traced how domination works by destabilizing perception, training people to doubt what they see, feel, and know. That doubt doesn’t stay external. It moves inward. People start second-guessing their own reality. Their own timing. Their own sense of what’s happening.

I feel like a lot of people are living inside that fracture right now. The training never ended. It scaled. It normalized. It got called resilience.

Now it’s metrics, indicators, and economic narratives instead of overseers. You’re told things are fine. Strong. Improving. And when your body doesn’t experience it that way, the assumption is that you need to adapt faster. Be more flexible. Manage yourself better.

I think a lot of people are living inside that gap right now. Between what they’re told and what they feel. Between the clock and their own sense of ancestral Timing.

And that gap does real damage over time.

I also think it matters who is feeling this for the first time, and who has been living inside it for generations.

I feel like some of the people I work with are encountering something in their bodies that Indigenous, Black, and colonized peoples have been naming for a long time. Not the same thing, in the same way. But an encounter with the logics of colonization lands somatically, as their old buffers of privilege thin.

I think this is part of what makes this moment so disorienting for a lot of white and otherwise privileged people. There’s a sense of shock. Of betrayal. Like the ground rules changed without warning. Like time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. And I feel like what’s actually happening is that the protections that once made colonial time feel abstract are thinning.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira talks about this as the loss of innocence that modernity depends on. The moment when the stories of progress, control, and inevitability stop working in the body. She’s clear that this is not shared suffering. It’s initiation without preparation. A reckoning with limits that other people were never allowed to forget.

I think that’s why the panic feels so loud in some spaces right now. Why people scramble for certainty, for solutions, for someone to tell them how to get back on track. I feel like they’re not just afraid of collapse.

They’re afraid of what it means to no longer be held outside of it.

For many Indigenous peoples, there was never a stable “before” to return to. Capitalism didn’t arrive as a sudden shock. It arrived as an ongoing disaster. Nick Estes keeps pointing this out, and I need that reminder. What feels like an ending for some has been the water others have been forced to swim in for generations. No promised future. No clean horizon. Just continuity under pressure.

That difference matters. It shapes who feels surprised by this moment and who recognizes it immediately.

And I feel like part of what’s happening now is that colonial time is failing even the people it once protected.

That doesn’t make this moment symmetrical. But it does reveal cracks.

It exposes how deeply time itself was used as a tool of separation. Who was allowed to plan? Who was forced to survive? Who got to imagine futures? Who was told to endure?

And now, as those separations break down, many people are feeling something they don’t yet have the language for. A loss of orientation. A loss of trust. A loss of coherence. A sense that obedience to the clock no longer guarantees safety.

I think this is where respons-ability begins.

I feel like it begins with staying present to what’s actually happening, without rushing to assign meaning or blame. Without turning the experience into performance or confession. Without making oneself the center of the story.

I feel a loss of coherence in conversations, in planning, and in how people talk about the future. Things don’t line up the way they used to. Stories don’t hold. Timelines feel unreliable. And instead of trying to force coherence back into place, our work right now is learning how to stay with that unraveling without hardening or numbing out. Living in Nepantla.

I think that kind of staying power requires listening. Not to the clock. Not to the metrics. But to Time itself, in a deeper sense. The kind of Time that isn’t broken, even when the systems built on top of it are. The kind of Time that has always known how to move without guarantees.

There are people and cultures who have been living in relationship with that kind of Time for as long as humans have had culture. People who were never promised stability, progress, or protection. People who learned how to orient by rhythm, by land, by kinship, by responsibility rather than certainty.

Listening to Time again means letting those ways of knowing and being rise.

Colonial time gets tighter. Louder. More insistent. It demands urgency even when urgency makes no sense. It tells people to hurry, to adapt, to optimize, to push through. It treats speed as virtue and pause as failure. And when the ground starts to shift, it doesn’t slow down. It accelerates.

Other timeways don’t move like that.

Indigenous Time doesn’t operate this way. Feminist Time doesn’t either. Queer and Crip Time definitely don’t. These ways of being in Time are built around relationship rather than dominance. They orient life through rhythm, season, reciprocity, pause, grief, repair. They measure what matters through continuity and responsibility, not output.

I feel like that contrast is becoming harder to ignore.

Right now, the United States keeps insisting the economy is strong while people struggle to afford food, housing, medical care, and rest. Job numbers circulate while jobs disappear. Inflation statistics flatten lived experience into something abstract and bloodless.

At the same time, other nations are dumping U.S. Treasury bonds, kneecapping the very structures that the empire meant to guarantee stability. The story tightens. The pressure builds. The pace intensifies.

I think this is how gaslighting works at scale, through colonial time.

I keep noticing how power shows up through pace. Through who gets rushed and who is made to wait. Through whose exhaustion is treated as acceptable, even necessary. Tempo becomes a way of sorting lives. Speed, delay, urgency, depletion. These aren’t neutral conditions. They’re governed. Achille Mbembe names this clearly when he writes about modern power as something that governs time as much as territory. Who waits? Who moves? Who burns out? Who becomes disposable?

And what makes this so hard to resist is how intimate it feels.

In what Byung-Chul Han calls the achievement society, exhaustion doesn’t look imposed. It looks self-generated. People experience depletion as personal failure rather than structural pressure. The demand to perform, optimize, and accelerate moves inside. The violence disappears behind motivation. Behind self-improvement. Behind the promise of becoming better, faster, and more capable.

Over time, people internalize the linear clock.

They blame themselves for feeling depleted. They assume they lack discipline or resilience. They treat exhaustion as a personal shortcoming instead of a signal. I feel like this is why so many people are confused right now. The tempo itself is violent, but it’s framed as opportunity. As ambition. As progress.

This isn’t new.

Indigenous, feminist, and Black thinkers have been naming this for a long time. Silvia Federici traces how capitalism required the theft of time just as much as the theft of land. Care, rest, reproductive labor, and cyclical rhythms were stripped of value and pushed out of view. Time was reorganized around extraction. Communal life was fractured. To control labor, people first had to be severed from rhythms that didn’t serve accumulation.

That severing didn’t end. It spread.

Estes keeps me honest about what “collapse” even means. An ongoing disaster. Continuity for some. Shock for others. That difference matters.

When denial intensifies, linear time tightens even more.

People are told to adapt faster. Innovate harder. Hustle smarter. The future gets framed as an individual responsibility rather than a shared horizon. And when people can’t keep up, they’re told they lack grit, vision, resilience.

Reality fractures. Authority insists nothing is wrong. The body carries the contradiction.

Collapse rarely arrives as spectacle.

More often it arrives as disbelief.Disbelief in calendars, in futures, and in one’s own pacing.

Collapse is the moment certain stories no longer continue, as Bayo Akomolafe writes about in the “cracks.” One of those stories is obedient time. The belief that if we move faster, comply harder, and optimize better, stability will return.

It doesn’t.

What many people call burnout, anxiety, or loss of direction makes more sense to me as ancestral time injury, severance. An injury created by enforced tempos that override bodily knowing and sever relationship with land, ancestry, and future. Repair doesn’t come through better scheduling or mindset shifts. It comes through re-entering relationship.

That’s what this letter is circling.

This is the first in a short series on time injury and Time repair. Repair. Each letter names one fracture and offers one way of listening. Each one refuses urgency. This series doesn’t promise relief. It offers orientation and a way back to coherence.

Because right now, a lot of people don’t need fixing. They need help trusting what they’re already feeling.

The Practice

There’s a small practice I return to when time feels hostile. Not as control. As listening.

Once per day, I pause and notice how Time moved through me.

Where did I rush when my body asked for pause?Where did I linger without justification?Where did time feel hostile?Where did it feel relational?

I don’t try to correct anything. I don’t optimize. I just notice.

Today I stood on the deck and watched the rain. I felt the portal of 13 Imox open. I felt how collective this moment is.

That noticing changes the relationship. It reframes Time as something I’m already in conversation with, rather than something I’m failing to manage. Over time, that kind of attention restores trust. It makes room for consent. It loosens obedience.

This work doesn’t require urgency.

The rest of this series will keep tracing how Time breaks under empire, how bodies register truth before institutions do, and how repair has always been a collective practice. These letters stand on their own.

There’s no rush. The clock is cracking anyway.

Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.

With wild and rebellious love,

Maltiox! xo Ixchel

P.S. If you want a small taste of how to befriend Time without joining anything long-term, the Rhythm Reset session is a single, simple reset to help you find your pace again. You can book your session here.

P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.

🌒 Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) →

✍🏽 Meet OoSo Studio →

👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏾 Ways to work with me...

🎙️ Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or program…

✨ Do Epic S**t. Stay Intact.

Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.

Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition

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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