Dragon 🐉 Letter #112: An answer to a mysterious childhood question, an evening ritual, and a tree that answered.
Listen to post · 6:44Hola! 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.
“A bee can fly back to her hive.
A grasshopper can hide in tall grass.
But where does a butterfly go when it rains?”
— May Garelick
Beautiful Wildling,
I have not felt drawn to add more noise to the din. My attention has narrowed instead. My body has asked for fewer inputs and more tending. I have been practicing what helps my nervous system stay here while the world feels violently unsteady, especially during the 6.5 tremor on Friday morning.
I have been choosing evenings over updates. I chose a small window of Time where nothing asks me to respond.
Each night at twilight, something began to happen outside my window. Dozens of butterflies arrived together, in a kaleidoscope, which is what a group of butterflies is called. Isn’t that a fabulous name for it? Kaleidoscope.
They flew into the same tree and slipped beneath the leaves. They settled on the undersides and went still. No circling. No scattering. They arrived all at once and rested together, each under their own leaf at the exact moment. I watched this happen once. Then again. Then again.
I did not plan to turn this into anything. I only noticed it. The noticing slowed me. It drew me to the same spot at the same hour. When it became a pattern, I called my partner to come see. We waited together. We watched the sky dim. We watched the tree. We did not speak much. Then the butterflies came.
The waiting became an evening ritual without a name. We sat there on the terraza every night at the same time. When the butterflies arrived, we burned one of our thirteen wishes. One slip of paper. One flame. One release. Some nights there were many. One night it felt close to fifty. The tree held them. The leaves held them. The air held all of us.
Butterflies have always lived close to my mother’s heart. She loves them without explanation, the way some beings claim us early. One of my clearest childhood memories comes from evenings with my step-dad, sitting close while he read Where Does the Butterfly Go When It Rains. I was four, maybe five. The question felt enormous then. I cried when I learned they only live a few short weeks. Each one is so precious. Where do such delicate, short lives go for shelter?
Fifty years later, standing at my own window, I watched dozens of butterflies slip beneath the leaves of a tree at dusk. The answer arrived through lived experience. The land offered guidance across decades. Memory closed a quiet circle.
Nothing asked to be understood. I did not try to decide what it meant or reach for symbolism. I stayed with the experience as it was. Arrival. Gathering. Rest.
One afternoon, the rain came earlier than expected. The evening stayed wet. The butterflies did not come. The next night, only a few returned. The pattern had shifted. Our ritual held anyway. We still waited, watched, and burned a wish.
It felt honest. Things gather. Things disperse. Timing changes. Attention remains.
I know this is likely seasonal. I know migration and bloom cycles shape these movements. Knowing that does not reduce what happened. It deepens it. Life organizes itself without asking for permission. Life moves together when conditions allow and rests where it finds cover.
Solace did not arrive as comfort, it arrived as company. Shared watching. Shared Time. Shared breath. The tree became a place of return.
Then today something else arrived. A very rare violet sabrewing hummingbird appeared for the second time. It perched in the same tree where the butterflies roost. A being known for motion chose stillness. It sat there long enough to be seen.
I am writing this as a record, not advice. An offering of witness.
When attention shifts from urgency to presence, patterns surface. When bodies slow, other lives come into view. When Time is met without demand, something gathers.
I wonder what awaits you at the same hour each day.
What shows up when you soften your attention and let yourself arrive?
What small ritual wants to form without instruction, guided by the land around you?
This is how I am staying here.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If your body wants a place to slow Time down with another, a single Rhythm Reset session or Queering Rhythm, a package of 4 sessions, are available now. These are live gatherings for you and me to listen, settle, and orient without fixing or forcing insight. Just presence, rhythm, and shared breath. You are welcome there.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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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.
