Dragon 🐉 Letter # 88: The Coup Echoes Across Borders
Offerings for This Time of Earth in Transition
As we move through this threshold — navigating the collapse of empire, the shifting tides of power, and the ancestral winds of 13 Iq’ — now is the time to root deeply into your purpose, presence, and message.
🔥 Stellar Impression Mentorship – For visionaries, creatives, and changemakers seeking to refine their voice and magnetize the right people. This mentorship aligns your personal cosmology with your brand, message, and visibility, ensuring that what you offer is a lodestar for those who need it most in these times of transformation.
🌿 Wild Presence Mentorship – For leaders and guides who are committed to deconditioning from empire’s urgency and remembering their innate rhythm. Through deep listening, embodied Flow, and decolonial praxis, we cultivate leadership that is rooted, sovereign, and attuned to the cycles of time rather than the demands of dominator culture.
If you feel the shifts and know that your work, voice, and presence are needed now more than ever, I invite you to step into mentorship. Let’s align your purpose with the Flow of Time and the wisdom of what is unfolding.
— Now, onto the Dragon Letter. 🔥
Beloved Wildlings
There’s a myth that borders create distance. That what happens on one side of the line stops at the fence, the river, the militarized checkpoint. But those of us who have lived inside the seams of empire know better. When the U.S. trembles, the ripple turns into a tidal wave, sweeping through economies, politics, and daily lives far beyond its borders.
I awake each day to another round of chaos north of the line, watching the slow-motion unraveling of a country that still believes in its own invincibility.
A coup — whether overt or creeping in bureaucratic shadows — doesn’t just belong to the U.S. It belongs to the world it has entangled in its empire, and Mexico is no exception.
Mexico Feels It in the Bones of Its Economy
The peso flutters, the cost of goods surges, and suddenly, everyday purchases— eggs, tortillas, a doctor’s visit — feel heavier. Much of Mexico’s economy is directly linked to the U.S., from remittances that sustain entire towns to trade policies dictated by TFG (that fucking guy).
A political crisis up north means financial precarity down here, whether in the form of inflation, supply chain disruptions, or multinational corporations tightening their grip on resources.
Let’s talk about migration — because we have to. The militarization of Mexico’s southern border is not Mexico’s idea; it is TFG’s demand. Policies crafted in D.C. dictate how Mexico polices Central and South American migrants, deciding who gets stopped, detained, or pushed into ever more perilous routes.
But militarization isn’t just happening at the border — it’s expanding into the heart of places like San Cristóbal de las Casas, 90 miles from la frontera de Guatemala. A local who’s been away for a few years told me the other day that Centro is so quiet now that it feels like San Cris from ten years ago.
That kind of silence isn’t always peace — it’s the kind of hush that comes when a city is being subdued and the state decides who can freely exist in public space and who cannot.
I wonder if anyone else is worried about possible U.S. drone attacks on cartels. The idea isn’t far-fetched, not when empire sees bodies as targets before it sees them as people.
How do you target a cartel kid on a motorcycle in Centro with a drone? What happens when the tech of war — perfected in the Middle East — gets rebranded as “security” and unleashed on communities in Chiapas?
When a coup shifts the power structure in the U.S., the policies shift with it — but never in favor of the people moving through the land. Instead, the walls grow higher, the violence increases, and those already at risk become more expendable.
The Cultural Occupation Is Unshaken
Even if I wanted to de-center the U.S. from my life, from my mind, from my daily interactions, I couldn’t. English remains the currency of global business. The algorithms that decide what we see online, what ideas gain traction, and what histories are erased are engineered in Silicon Valley.
The movies that shape global consciousness, the corporations that extract from our lands and bodies, and the social norms that permeate even the most decolonial circles are all anchored in the imperial core.
To pretend otherwise would be to gaslight myself.
Living in Nicaragua or Mexico hasn’t meant escaping the empire — it’s meant being inside one of its testing grounds. The neoliberal policies first inflicted on Latin America — deregulation, privatization, and the erosion of social safety nets — were later exported back to the U.S. itself.
What happens here, in the shadows of empire, foreshadows what will happen there.
The Last Gasp of Empire: The Fire in the Distance Flickers and Fades
When the U.S. undergoes crisis — political, economic, or social — it does not collapse in isolation. Its chaos spills over in the form of policy shifts, migration patterns, economic disruptions, and the normalization of authoritarian tactics. Those of us outside its borders do not get to simply watch; we are always implicated.
Consider what Canada has been grappling with these past days, actual invasion protection planning — a direct result of empire’s destabilization, its inability to hold itself together without dragging others down with it.
And yet, here in Mexico, we also hold something else: time-tested ways of survival, resistance, and remembering that empires do not last forever.
Time here is not the rushed, extractive force that capitalism demands — it is relational. It pulses in the flow of compañerismo, in the weaving of centuries-long resistance, in the knowledge that the future is not some linear path dictated by those in power but something we create in the now, in every act of presence.
So, as the U.S. broligarchy engineers another era of turmoil, I watch, not as a distant spectator, but as someone already feeling the tremors. I have no illusions that I can sever its grip on my life — but I can choose how I move within it.
I choose to anchor myself in the deep Time of the land, where Flow is not a productivity hack but the river carving through the mountains, the cycles of maize, the rhythm of uprising and renewal.
I refuse the illusion of inevitability that empire sells. I hold fast to the truth that something beyond empire is not only possible, but already taking shape.
I think about the way the collective weaves itself into everything here. Not just in the obvious ways — protests, original people defending their land, women rising in collective power — but in the quiet moments, too. In the presence of a vet who stays long after the care is given, in a neighbor who brings tortillas unprompted, in the chingona leader who walks unguarded through pueblos too often forgotten.
The U.S. continues to define itself by its exceptionalism and its myth of individualism — even as that very myth crumbles under the weight of fascism.
But here in Mexico, in Chiapas, survival has never been a solo act. It has always been collective.
This is what empire will never understand: Flow belongs to the people, not to dominator culture. Flow is in the collective resistance, the refusal to be erased, the refusal to let Time be dictated by those who see only profit and control.
Beyond Empire’s Reach: The Highland Strategy of Resistance
During the time of the conquistadores, when Spanish forces swept through Mesoamerica bringing war, enslavement, and forced conversion, the original peoples of these lands retreated to the highlands — dense forests, towering mountains, and mist-covered valleys that offered both refuge and resistance.
In places like the Andes, Chiapas, and Guatemala, these rugged terrains became sanctuaries where communities could evade capture, escape the brutality of colonial rule, and safeguard their cultural ways of being. The highlands held more than just physical protection; they became strongholds of ancestral knowledge, where language, rituals, and traditions could survive outside the grasp of empire.
While conquest reshaped cities and lowlands, these mountain enclaves resisted, carrying forward the rhythms of the Maya and the Andes, the sovereignty of the land, and the deep-rooted wisdom of those who refused to be erased. The descendants of these highland refuges still embody that spirit of defiance, knowing that empire has always been something to outlast,not surrender to.
The wisdom of the highlands — the knowledge that survival is found in retreating from empire’s grasp while fortifying what cannot be taken —carries forward as a lesson for those living under empire in the U.S. now. Just as our ancestors fled to the mountains to evade forced assimilation and destruction, there are ways to carve out spaces of resistance, places where the soul, the body, and the communal spirit remain intact.
Whether that is through reclaiming land, severing dependence on extractive economies, or building autonomous networks of care, the lesson remains: empire is not inevitable. It is something to outlast, something to render irrelevant by refusing to bend to its time, its demands, its ways of severing people from themselves and each other.
Just as the original peoples protected our cosmologies and ways of being beyond the reach of the conquistadores, those under the modern empire can weave new refuges — through ancestral practices, through underground economies, through collective defiance. The highlands were never just a place; they were a strategy, a way of remembering that the power of empire is never absolute. It can be sidestepped, outlived, and undone.
🔥 A Fire for the Resisters: A Message from Chiapas 🔥
This Fire Ceremony I tended last Friday evening was dedicated to the Resisters. The response from the fire was very strong. Take the fire to heart. ❤️🔥 From Chiapas with Love 💌
A Wayeb’ Time out of Time Ritual for the Transition Ahead
Today marks the beginning of Wayeb’, the five-day liminal period between one Mayan solar year and the next — a time to release, reflect, and prepare for the cycle ahead. The old year closes, and the doors of the new remain open but not yet crossed.
This is a time to purify, to shed, to listen. The year we enter carries the energy of 13 Iq’ — wind, spirit, voice, and change. It is the breath of the ancestors stirring, the whisper that becomes a hurricane. Words spoken now will carry weight — so let them be intentional. Let them be truth.
In these next five days, I invite you to ground yourself in ritual:
🔥 Light a candle — for clarity, for protection, for the ancestors who speak.
🌱 Walk barefoot on the earth — feel the pulse of deep time beneath your feet.
💨 Breathe deeply into your body — inhale the winds of change, exhale what no longer serves.
🌊 Offer water to the land — a libation for the cycles that turn, the renewal always in motion.
📖 Write your prayers, your intentions, your offerings to Time — ask for guidance, and listen.
This is a year when messages will come through clearly, whether we are ready or not. The spirit world is speaking. The question is, will we listen?
Maybe you’re feeling the weight of what’s happening in the U.S. right now, already exhausted by the daily onslaught of overreach and repression. Maybe you’re wondering how we hold together when everything is being engineered to divide us.
And I don’t have an easy answer. But I know this:
Resistance isn’t only in the grand gestures — it is in the smallest acts of care, in the decision to be present, in the refusal to turn away.
-Ixchel Lunar
We were never meant to do this alone. And we won’t.
How are you holding up? How do you cope, resist, and thrive amid the chaos?
Share your reflections in the Substack comments or reply to this email.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Ciao! xo Ixchel
P.S. If you’re feeling the shifts and know that your voice, presence, and work are needed now more than ever, 🔥 Stellar Impression and 🌿 Wild Presence Mentorships are here to support you. Whether you are refining your message, deepening your leadership, or reclaiming your relationship with Time beyond empire, these mentorships offer grounded, strategic, and intuitive guidance during this moment of transformation.
If you’re ready to move with intention in this Time, I’d love to support you.
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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.
