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.
If you haven’t shopped the Black Friday sale yet, you’re in luck! Today is the last day of the sale. The BOGO sessions are a fabulous way to receive mentorship with me on your personal cosmology.
A small note before you begin reading.
I’ve made a shift to Wild Presence. The work itself hasn’t changed, but the way it’s held has. I lowered the price for the group tier and simplified the rhythm so it better reflects what this work is actually about.
I won’t be doing weekly live calls anymore. Instead, Wild Presence now moves with a steadier cadence:
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One monthly recorded teaching you can meet in your own time
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Monthly team calls
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Weekly Practice Lab for staying in rhythm
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A live Monthly Full Moon Flow Circle
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Ongoing library access, templates, and Soma Reverie tools
This felt like the right change. Less urgency. More integration. A rhythm people can live inside.
If Wild Presence is part of your path, it’s here. If not, let this letter be enough.
New Live Workshop: Ancestral Ways for Precarious TimesA live Rhythm Reset for listening between years.
This is a threshold practice for those standing between years, feeling the weight of what’s unfinished, and wanting a collective way to pause, listen, and orient without urgency. We’ll slow Time down enough to listen, without forcing insight or resolution.
Monday, December 2912pm CT / 1pm ET
Beautiful Wildling,
I’m writing this at solstice, when the light does what it always does. It turns, pauses, and holds. No permission asked. No explanation offered.
I feel the pause in my body before I think it.
Solstice has always felt like a quiet refusal. A reminder that Time moves whether empires agree or not. The earth slows. The night deepens. Growth pauses without apology. Nothing gets optimized. Nothing gets justified.
That feels important right now.
Today I’m going to a temazcal. My new neighbor and friend Gabby, who runs the restorative yoga center, named this one Sol Invictus. The undefeated sun. I keep sitting with that phrase. Not as conquest or triumph, but continuity. As something older than collapse narratives. As light that keeps returning even after long dark.
Temazcal moves on a different tempo. Floral waters to hydrate the body, then heat. Then breath. Sweat follows. Then floral bath. Listening comes in waves. You leave when it’s time. There isn’t anything to prove in temazcal. Nothing to figure out or extract. Meaning shows up, or it doesn’t. The body settles into sequence on its own, without being pushed or directed.
Solstice feels like that too.
This stretch of nights has long been treated as thin in many lineages. Not mystical in a flashy way. Thin in the sense that listening travels farther. Sequence loosens. The future stops demanding explanation.
That’s why the practice of thirteen wishes for the twelve nights keeps calling to me each year. Not as intention setting. Not as manifestation. As relationship. Each night, a wish offered without demand. One wish left unchosen. The thirteenth. The one that does not belong to willpower. The one that belongs to Time itself.
That last wish always tells the truth.
I’m sitting with this practice alongside my friend Lisa Jara, who holds a grounded container for the Mystical Nights. Steady companionship for listening forward without force. I’m linking to her work for those who want to walk this stretch with others. It starts today.
What I keep noticing is how unfamiliar this way of being with Time feels for many people. Allowing sequence to breathe. Letting uncertainty stay open. Leaving wishes unfinished without trying to force them closed.
That kind of spaciousness wasn’t encouraged. It had to be relearned.
Modern life trained us away from this. It taught us to grip the future. To fill every pause. To treat uncertainty as failure. Walter Mignolo names this bind clearly in his work on modernity and coloniality. The promise of progress always arrives braided with control. A single timeline is presented as universal, while other ways of living with Time are dismissed as backward, inefficient, or expendable.
So when Time loosens its grip, panic rushes in to fill the space.
I feel that panic in the air right now. Not always loud. Often restless. A scrambling for plans. For certainty and reassurance that things will return to how they were supposed to work.
Underneath that, I feel something quieter. A fear of no longer being held outside of what is unraveling.
For many ancient peoples, there was never an outside. No stable before or guaranteed horizon. Collapse did not arrive as an event. It arrived as continuity. That difference matters. It shapes how this moment lands in the body.
What feels shocking to some feels familiar to others.
Solstice does not resolve that difference. It does not smooth it over. It simply refuses to hurry past it.
I feel responsibility beginning here. Not as guilt. As presence. Staying with what is happening without turning it into performance. Without centering oneself as the measure of it. Without demanding immediate meaning.
This is what Nepantla feels like in practice. Standing inside the unraveling without hardening or numbing. Letting coherence loosen without forcing it back into place.
That kind of staying requires listening beyond the clock. Not to the metrics. To Time itself. The deeper one. The kind that was never broken, even when systems built on top of it are failing.
There are cultures that have never stopped orienting this way by rhythm, land, kinship, and by responsibility rather than certainty. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes this as grounded normativity. Ways of living that arise from long relationship with specific places and peoples. Norms shaped by responsibility to land rather than obedience to abstract systems.
Those ways of knowing do not rush. They wait for readiness. They trust sequence without trying to control it.
Listening to Time again means letting those ways rise without trying to own them.
Colonial time responds to uncertainty by tightening. It speeds up. It demands urgency. It mistakes acceleration for care. When things destabilize, it pushes harder.
Other timeways slow.
They pause and descend. They sit in heat. They make wishes without knowing how they will land.
That contrast is getting harder to ignore.
Right now, the dominant story keeps insisting stability while bodies register strain. People feel it in their sleep. In their breath. In the way planning starts to feel brittle. When authority insists nothing is wrong, the body learns to carry the contradiction.
This is how colonial time becomes hostile.
I want to add something from this week, because it feels like part of the same listening.
My birthday was lovely. Quiet. Rooted. Gabby, hosted a posada. We were all invited. I met more neighbors. We ate together and talked about the land.
People shared updates about what’s happening nearby. There’s a potato farm that stripped trees and soaked the soil in glyphosate. And an equestrian center expanding toward Olympic scale. These are projects that treat land like a surface instead of a living system. My neighbors are already organizing. Talking about protection. Talking about limits. Talking about care.
A posada is a re-enactment of Mary and Joseph seeking a place to birth. It matters here. What I love about it isn’t the religiosity. It’s the migration story underneath. The asking. The refusal. The asking again. The eventual welcome.
It makes sense to me why, thankfully, Mexico stands with Palestine. This story is retold every year. Jesus was Palestinian. His mother was a vulnerable migrant. The tradition keeps reminding people what it means to ask for refuge and to offer it.
During the posada, the neighbors sing outside the door, asking to be let in. The host sings back, asking what they want. They sing about birth. About needing shelter. The host sings about the ponche de frutas and the galletas waiting inside. Then the door opens. They’re received.
Everyone I met has come here from somewhere else in Mexico. Gabby’s mom talked about when they arrived in the mid-80s. How there were only vacas (cows) and vaqueros (cowboys) on this land then. No yoga center, no glyphosate, or expansion projects. Just open space and shared tending.
They all recognize themselves in the story.
Sitting there, listening, I felt it in my body. This is where I belong. These are my people. People who know what it means to arrive. To ask. To protect what receives you.
This is also Time repair. Not abstract. Not symbolic. It’s land, story, neighbor, responsibility, and welcome moving together at human speed.
I keep coming back to this as solstice, temazcal, posada, and land braid together.
Collapse doesn’t arrive first as fire or flood. It arrives as a quiet loss of obedience to imposed time. When people stop believing the schedule. When the grind stops making sense. When urgency loses its moral authority.
Power cracks there.
Modern systems depend on time discipline. On speed. On compliance with pace. On the belief that if you keep moving, keep optimizing, keep up, safety will follow. When that belief erodes, so does the system built on it.
I feel that erosion everywhere right now. In how people disengage from grind narratives. In how bodies refuse tempos they can no longer survive. In how land itself pushes back against extraction.
This is not chaos. It’s refusal.
Glen Coulthard writes about refusal not as a reaction, but as a grounded political stance. A decision to stop participating in systems that require ongoing harm. Refusal rooted in place. In kinship. In responsibility rather than recognition.
God Time, not government time.
Protection of land is not separate from Time repair. It is one of its clearest expressions.
When people organize to stop glyphosate from poisoning soil. When they resist expansion projects that treat land like a surface. When they gather, sing, and receive one another into homes. They are refusing the timeline that says extraction comes first and care comes later.
They are choosing a different tempo.
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that reciprocity is not a metaphor. It is a practice. A way of living that asks how to give back to what sustains you. Time repair looks like this. Slowing enough to listen to land. Refusing urgency long enough to notice what is being harmed. Choosing presence over speed.
This is not heroic work. It’s quiet. Repetitive. Collective. It doesn’t ask for recognition. It asks for consistency.
If you want a small way to practice this, here is what I’ve been holding.
Each day, choose one micro-refusal of time.
Refuse urgency.Refuse explanation.Refuse optimization.Refuse speed.
Name it silently. Not as a performance. As a boundary.
Notice what becomes possible when you do.
These refusals are political, whether or not they are visible. They shift relationship. They interrupt extraction. They create space where care and protection can take root.
Collapse is not the end of the world. It is the end of obedient time.
What comes next depends on what we choose to protect.
Land.Breath.Kin.Sequence.Welcome.
The next letter will trace urgency itself. How it disguises harm as care. How refusal opens space for repair.
For now, solstice holds us. The undefeated sun keeps returning.
And Time, the deeper one, is still listening.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If you’re curious what it feels like to slow Time down enough to listen, Rhythm Reset is a single session where we follow your body’s pace and notice what wants repair. One session. No long arc. Just attentive listening and a small recalibration. You can book your session here.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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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.
