Decolonizing Time isn’t a checkbox. It’s lingering. It’s dwelling in Nepantla.
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.
The next Dragon Letters is gestating. Until then, we will be revisiting my work and offerings in a 5-email series called Reframes. Enjoy!
Beautiful Wildlings,
Maybe you’ve been trying to fix your schedule.
Color-code your calendar. Wake up earlier. Set better boundaries.
You’ve read the Substacks. Bought All.The.Planners. Took the $997 course from the 7-figure powerhouse who swears her 5AM miracle morning will finally set you free.
And still, Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’… into the future.
Cue Steve Miller Band. 🎶
Like no matter what you do, there’s never quite enough of it.
Always trying to catch up with yourself.
You’re not doing it wrong.
You’re living through a rupture.
What we often call “time management” is actually a symptom of colonial Time disorientation, a centuries-deep severance from the rhythms that once pulsed through land, body, season, and kin.
The Reframe:It’s not either/or. You’re dwelling in the in-between.
“If I just fix my schedule or find the right flow method, everything will fall into place.”
This binary says you’re either in grind culture or fully liberated. Either productive or in Flow, either surviving or resisting.
Colonial Root:
This comes from an imperialist cosmology rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and religious dualism, a system that flattens Time into measurable units and divides life into sacred/profane, rest/work, success/failure.
Time must be controlled. Perfected. Optimized.
It says healing is a destination. That if you’re not out of the grind, you must be doing it wrong.
New Lens:
As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in Borderlands/La Frontera, we are in Nepantla — the liminal space between worlds and stories, identities and timelines.
We are the in-between generation.
Raised inside broken clocks and imperial schedules, yet longing for something else.
We are trying to unlearn urgency while still paying rent. Trying to tend to ancestors while still holding grief. Trying to reclaim rhythm in a world that sells it back to us as a productivity hack.
Decolonizing Time isn’t a checkbox.
It’s not a productivity detox or a return to a mythical pre-colonial past.
It’s a spiral.
It’s a sacred unlearning, and a sacred reweaving across generations.
Here’s what we’re reckoning with:
🕰️ Stolen Time
As Dr. Brittney Cooper writes, Time was taken through colonization and enslavement, severing Black and Brown peoples from their histories, futures, and very lifespans.
💸 Commodified Time
Nicole Marie Shippen shows how Time became monetized, sold back to us in units of labor, optimized for extraction.
📏 Divided + Perfected Time
Time fractured into rigid segments that punish neurodivergence, ignore body wisdom, and demand constant productivity.
♀️ Gender-Extracted Time
Where care work, emotional labor, and domestic coordination are siphoned into invisible pockets, time that’s counted by no one but us.
🌐 Outsourced Time
Tyson Yunkaporta warns of rhythm displaced, rest mediated through tech, entropy pushed onto the Earth shortening lifespans of her and the marginalized.
🚫 Fascist-Foreclosed Time
Estelle Ellison calls it Time stripped of possibility, where fascist and capitalist systems restrict our agency, criminalize liberatory acts, and render radical futures unimaginable before they can take root.
🌫️ Disinchronized Time
As Byung-Chul Han names, it’s spectral and flattened, we lose sync with each other, the Earth, and our own nervous systems because we forget to linger.
It took 500+ years to contort Time into something extractive.
It’ll take generations to uncoil the damage.
But that’s not cause for despair —
It’s a refusal to obey.
A slow revolt in rhythm.
A burning of the script empire handed you.
The Possibility: A new rhythm is possible, even here
You don’t have to leave the system to start healing your relationship with Time.
You begin right where you are: in your inbox, in the pause before you reply, in the way you enter or exit the room.
You begin by noticing how urgency moves through your nervous system. How your calendar might reflect survival, but not soul.
You begin by unhooking from the lie that says you’re either “on track” or “behind.”
Because you’re not behind.
You’re good with Time.
When you enter into sacred relationship with Time — as a being, not a resource — you begin to hear when rest becomes holy.
When your ancestors whisper in synchronicity.
When your body pulses with a rhythm older than capitalism.
You stop trying to perform Time, and begin tending it.
Not with hustle. With reverence.
Why I Can Hold This Work
I don’t teach decolonial Time theory as a concept, I live it.
I’ve reclaimed Time through chronic illness, neurodivergence, and the slow rhythm of re-rooting after exile. I’ve learned to build systems that move with the rhythms of the land, the body, and the cosmos, not extract from us like empire has designed.
And I’ve guided others through that same spiral:
🌱 A queer entrepreneur who rebuilt her offerings around her energy, not urgency, and stopped ghosting her own brilliance.
🌕 A neurodivergent visionary who let go of the shame spiral of hyper-focus and inconsistency and began trusting their lunar rhythm.
🌀 A mixed-lineage writer who rewove ancestral practices into her daily rituals and finally called her genius home.
This is not a quick fix.
(Sorry, not sorry.)
This is rhythm restoration.
This is spiral Time.
This is Wild Presence.
Join Us Before Tonight’s Bonus Ends
If you’ve been feeling the ache of disconnection… if you’ve tried all the planning hacks and still feel burnt out or behind… if you’re ready to unlearn performance and live in rhythm with your ancestors, your land, and your sacred Self, come walk with us in Nepantla.
🌿 Wild Presence Collective is a 4-month (renewable) spiral of group coaching, ritual practice, and Time ecology designed for sacred misfits, especially those who are queer, neurodivergent, and of mixed lineage. We hold Time together. We move in rhythm. We stop performing belonging and start living it.
🖤 PLOT TWIST BONUS ADDED:
Join today and receive two Spiral Time Rituals, including a sigil spell and talisman crafting ritual designed to help you embody your rhythm, not just think about it.
🌀 Early Bird Bonuses end tonight.
🚪 Doors close August 15.
🧭 Orientation begins August 20.
🕊️ Sessions begin the first week of September.
With rhythm + rebellion…
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S.Enroll by tonightand receive a Ritual Deepening Bonus Session where we gather to activate your Ancestral Wayfinding Ritual Kit in real time — including your Ancestral Lineage Assessment, required for the Inheritance healing work.
We’ll set the altar, create ritual protection, open the channels, and begin listening across Time.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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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.
