Dragon Letter below, but first a shameless affiliate promotion….
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Everyone who joins FG Funnels through my affiliate link before the end of the year will receive a free set-up session with me ($397 value). During that session, I’ll help you set up your FG Funnels account, including email, domains with Cloudflare, and more. Use my link and then send me your FGF confirmation email to receive my support setup.
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FG Funnels is a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), Calendar Scheduler, Website and Funnel Builder, Membership Portal, and Messaging tool that I use for my business.
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Everyone who joins FG Funnels through my affiliate link by the end of the year will receive a free set-up session with me ($397 value). During that session, I’ll help you set up your FG Funnels account, including email, domains with Cloudflare, and more. Send me your FGF confirmation email to receive my set-up session.
Beautiful Wildlings!
There’s a moment when you step into a forest — not just with your feet, but with your whole being — and you realize that the trees are listening to the quiet hum of connection, the gentle current of life that moves between roots, fungi, and soil.
In this moment, it’s as if the Earth is whispering a story — one you’ve always known but perhaps forgotten.
Today, in honor of the collectivism rising around the planet this month, I want to take you into that story — lore in which trees, fungi, and humans remind us that resilience is a collective art, not an individual act.
In this story, the ancient wisdom of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) meets the science of Flow states, and the threads of storytelling are woven as tightly as the mycelial networks beneath our feet.
Last week, I listened to Emergence Magazin Podcast’s interview with Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.
Zoë’s reflections on the intelligence of plants reminded me how deeply our modern worldview, shaped by hierarchies and domination, limits our understanding of the living world. She shared this profound observation:
“Every bundle of muscle in my body was woven from the sugars plants spun from moisture and air. My blood cells that course through my veins like water through rootlets are each kept ruby red with the oxygen plants made…. Every inward breath of mine was first breathed out by plants. In this material sense, in terms of what they’ve contributed to my physical being, they are as much my relatives as any family member I know.”
— Zoë Schlanger
This poetic truth reframes plants not just as resources but as kin, creators of the very conditions for life itself. Zoë’s exploration of the mysteries of plant intelligence aligns with Indigenous teachings that recognize the agency and personhood of all living beings — knowledge that Western science is only beginning to glimpse.
In the podcast, Zoë discussed the shift in science, as researchers begin to ask questions that were previously dismissed as unscientific.
She reminded us that these “new” insights about plants echo what Indigenous sciences have long understood: plants, like us, are relational beings. They have ways of sensing, remembering, and participating in the intricate web of life.
This understanding invites us into a more reciprocal and humble relationship with the world around us.
A Forest of Glimmers Beneath Our Feet
Glimmers, those fleeting moments of goodness and connection, exist not just in our lives but in the very fabric of the natural world. The forest, alive with subtle exchanges, offers countless glimmers when we slow down enough to notice: the way sunlight filters through the canopy, a faint breeze carrying the scent of pine, or the unseen hum of mycelial threads beneath our feet.
This hidden network, often referred to as the “Wood Wide Web,” reveals the forest’s quiet reciprocity — an interdependent system where trees and fungi nourish one another through continuous exchange.
Yet, as ecologist Suzanne Simard uncovered this underground web, her work sparked controversy in the scientific community. Was she anthropomorphizing the forest, projecting human values of cooperation onto non-human beings?
The debate echoed Zoë Schlanger’s questions in The Light Eaters andthe Emergence podcast episode: What happens when we acknowledge plants as dynamic, relational beings? Does this destabilize the hierarchies between ourselves and the natural world? (I hope so!)
These controversies invite us to consider that perhaps it’s not the flawed science itself but our unwillingness to accept the relational truths it reveals. Much like the glimmers we find in our daily lives, the forest invites us to pause, sense, and remember that resilience and healing come not through domination but through connection.
“Wood Wide Web” was coined by ecologist Suzanne Simard, who discovered how trees and fungi form a vast underground network. “Through back and forth conversations,” Simard explains, “trees increase the resilience of the whole community.” It’s not competition that rules the forest but reciprocity, the constant giving and receiving of nutrients and signals through fungal threads.
This is not so different from the way Indigenous peoples view the land. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “The land knows you, even when you are lost.” In the forests of her ancestors, there is no division between humans and the ecosystem; they are one continuous flow, exchanging not just resources but stories.
Animal communication
Last Friday was 11 Tz’ikin, one of my nawales (Mayan signs). The reminder in reading about Tz’ikin was to pay attention to visions in my dreams (an evening ritual for me each night before bed is to read the following day’s description of the energy of the day in the Mayan calendar). That night, I dreamt of a tiny frog on my back patio, sitting alone, calling me.
That morning, I went to the underground cistern hatch below that patio and opened it to find three tiny tree frogs clinging to the top edge of the hatch, waiting to leave. And every morning since, I’ve looked under the hatch to discover three more each morning.
Either I’m helping to increase the tree frog population, or these little ones really like my cistern. I’m being called to establish a water feature in the backyard for these water-loving woodland beings.
Storytelling as Mycelium
Stories, like mycelium, connect us. They carry wisdom across generations, binding communities in shared meaning. For Indigenous peoples, stories are the repositories of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). The stories teach us how to live on the land and remind us how to live with it.
During a cultural fire practice in Northern Australia, Indigenous elder Victor Steffensen remarked, “When you burn the right way, it’s like cleaning your house. The land breathes again, and so do we.”
These practices are encoded in stories that teach the rhythms of the land, guiding communities to care for ecosystems in ways that ensure survival for all our relations, human and other than human.
This storytelling is, in itself, a kind of Flow state. When we lose ourselves in a narrative, time bends and disappears. Neuroscience writer Steven Kotler describes Flow as the place where the “prefrontal cortex goes quiet,” and we become fully immersed in the present moment.
Flow is our hapic (embodied) relationship with the Cosmos (Time).
— Ixchel Lunar
In storytelling circles, our brains synchronize — cortisol rises during moments of tension, and oxytocin flows during connection. We become one organism, much like the forest.
Flow and the Forest
Flow is not just a human experience. It’s everywhere in nature. Mycorrhizal fungi operate in a perpetual state of ecological Flow, sensing and responding to environmental changes. Similarly, humans enter Flow when we align with the rhythms of our surroundings.
Imagine stepping into the natural cycles of the forest — walking barefoot, inhaling the scent of pine, and feeling the sunlight shift on your skin. You’re not separate from the Earth. You’re part of its breathing.
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
Ecological, Embodied Flow as Resistance
This deep relational Flow has been severed in our modern, extractive systems. Colonization fragmented ecosystems and the communal stories that taught us how to care for them.
“In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
This colonial mindset replaced mutual thriving with individual accumulation, a logic threatening forests and communities.
But resistance is rooted in remembering. In the Andean tradition, the Kichwa people speak of alli kawsay, a concept often appropriated from a more widely known term sumak kawsay and translated as Buen Vivir — “the good life,” which speaks more to individual well-being.
Rooted in the Kichwa language and worldview, the term alli kawsay reflects a way of being in harmony with people, nature, and the cosmos — a collective and ecological aspiration deeply embedded in Andean philosophy.
Unlike the dominant culture’s notions of “the ideal good life,” which often centers on material wealth or individual success, alli kawsay invites us to align with the sacred cycles of life, recognizing that true healing comes from reciprocity and interconnectedness rather than domination or control.
Alli kawsay reminds us that healing is possible when we align with the cycles of life, rather than trying to dominate them.
The Practice of Interconnection
Here’s the invitation: What if we lived as though our stories were mycelium, threading through the Earth, regenerating us and each other?
Start with your breath. Notice how it flows without you forcing it. Feel the rhythm of your own body aligning with the cycles of the day, the moon, the seasons. And then, listen. To the trees. To the ancestors. To the land itself.
Like the forest, we thrive in reciprocity. Every story we tell, gift we give, and moment we spend in connection strengthens the web. We are not separate from nature; we are nature. When we remember this, being in Flow becomes a state of being present and a way of life.
In my mentorship programs, we can explore Indigenous Ecological Timeways together. These bundles are still available until Friday. Stellar Impressions Mentorship focuses on how you show up and magnetize your soil clients in your business through your stories (messaging). Wild Presence mentorship focuses on how you show up with Flow in your life by tapping into the meaning of your stories.
Citations and Inspirations (Bookshop Affiliate links)
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Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree – For insights into mycorrhizal networks and their role in forest resilience.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass – For the relational wisdom of Indigenous storytelling and ecological reciprocity.
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Victor Steffensen, Fire Country (Amazon link, not available at Bookshop)– For his reflections on cultural burning and land stewardship.
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Steven Kotler, The Art of Impossible – For the neurobiology of Flow states.
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Kichwa People, teachings on alli kawsay and sumak kawsay – For Indigenous frameworks of interconnected balance and harmony.
By weaving the wisdom of ecologists, neuroscientists, and Indigenous stewards, we can begin to repair the stories of Indigenous Ecological Timeways that connect us, much like fungi repair the soil. Let’s tend to this web together.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With reverence for the threads of story that weave and nourish us,
Ciao! xo IxchelDecolonizing Time through Indigenous Ecological Timeways
P.S. There are 2 more mentorship bundles available to begin doing Indigenous Ecological Timeways work with me in Q1 2025.
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Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition
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.
