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.
Beautiful Wildling,
There are moments when language outgrows the container that first carried it. What began as survival begins to strengthen the weave. The work does not change direction, but it changes density.
Along the way, I was in conversation with women who insisted that lived experience is not an accident but a methodology waiting to be surfaced. Kelly Diels helped me see that what had been held against me was a source of power. The way I could not conform to colonial clock time, the way urgency strained my nervous system, and the way my body would not cooperate with acceleration. Those were not personal shortcomings. They were information. They revealed the system. Naming that pattern shifted something fundamental. What had felt like friction became power.
Leslie Tagorda’s AstroBrand Method sharpened another layer. Her application of the natal chart does not decorate identity; it clarifies tone. It showed me that the method carries frequency. The way I speak about Time, land, lineage, and leadership is not separate from my cosmology. The natal chart informs not just what I teach, but how I move through voice, pacing, and structure. The weave was already there. Their work helped me recognize the pattern.
Decolonizing Time did not begin as a theory for me. It emerged when my body refused urgency as a virtue. Illness made it impossible to negotiate capacity with discipline. Exile rearranged belonging. Response-ability accumulated in ways that felt moral and necessary and sometimes quietly violent to my nervous system. I did not set out to dismantle the clock. My body simply stopped complying with its terms.
Sylvia Wynter writes about how a single cosmology can overrepresent itself as universal. The ordering of Man stands in for the human. Linear time stands in for Time itself. The fiscal year, the quarterly target, the myth of uninterrupted productivity across a lifetime, these are not neutral tools. They are cultural agreements forged inside empire. They determine who rests and who stabilizes, who absorbs and who is absorbed. When I began speaking about Decolonizing Time, I was naming this structure. I was tracing how urgency had been normalized, how extraction had been spiritualized, how acceleration had been framed as devotion.
I drew from the Cholq’ij, from the spiral logic of Mayan geo-cosmovision, where Time is not a line but a weaving of relational return. I drew from adrienne maree brown’s articulation of fractal emergence, where small patterns replicate at scale, and from Tyson Yunkaporta’s insistence that pattern literacy must precede repair. I leaned into Robin Wall Kimmerer’s teaching that reciprocity is not metaphor but structure, a lived exchange between beings rather than an ethical ornament. These teachings were not aesthetic references. They were confirmations that the body’s refusal was not weakness but intelligence.
Decolonizing Time is an interruption. It interrupts urgency and grind culture. It interrupts the internalized belief that worth must be proven through output. And response-ability keeps surfacing.
Urgency is loud. Response-ability is quieter. It sits in the body. It shows up in what we carry without question.
The people who find me are rarely confused about their purpose. They are rarely undisciplined. They are The people who find me are rarely confused about their purpose. They are rarely undisciplined. They are creative founders, soulprenuers, leaders, cultural practitioners, organizers, healers, artists. These are high-capacity people holding meaningful work in precarious conditions. Their exhaustion does not come from laziness. It comes from carrying without discernment.
↠ The eldest daughter reflex.↠ The bridge between systems reflex.↠ The one who anticipates collapse reflex.↠ The one who absorbs tension before it spreads reflex.
Resmaa Menakem writes about how trauma lives in the body and reenacts itself through muscle memory. Urgency functions similarly. It is not merely a belief to deconstruct, but a contraction in the diaphragm. A forward lean in the spine. A reflexive yes before a pause. People can eloquently speak about cyclical time and yet override their bodies in the name of devotion. Response-ability moves through the nervous system before thought catches up.
In session after session, the shift is quiet. A leader releases projects that were never theirs to stabilize. An organizer recognizes the reflex to mediate before anyone has asked. A healing practitioner feels fatigue land differently, no longer as personal weakness, but as the weight of ancestral and systemic burdens carried without consent.
Ancestral work braids itself into this framework. As I guide clients into relationship with their well ancestors, as I sit in ceremony listening for what is not visible in the present, a pattern repeats. The ancestors do not ask for martyrdom. They ask that each person carry what is theirs and release what is not.
In lineage repair work, when an ancestral burden is named and returned to its rightful place, the body softens almost immediately. Shoulders lower. Breath deepens. The urge to overextend loosens. Something settles across time. Decolonizing Time is the work of repairing inherited reflex while weaving new worlds.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Nepantla, the in-between space where identities dissolve and reform, describes this territory. Decolonizing Time unsettles inherited patterns, and without re-patterning, people can feel unmoored. I saw this clearly. Clients could name the harm of colonial time and still feel its shape moving through their calendars, their commitments, their nervous systems. They could speak about rhythm and still carry more than their bodies could sustain. The shifts that endured reorganized response-ability at the level of the body.
From that lived work, three movements came into focus.
Ignite is not inspiration. It is recognition. It is the moment a client sees the difference between devotion and compulsion. It is the naming of lane, the clear delineation between what is theirs to respond to and what has been unconsciously absorbed from lineage or system.
Embody is slower and less glamorous. It is the rebuilding of trust between leadership and the nervous system. It stabilizes capacity. It is allowing scope to shrink where it must, so that depth can increase. I have watched clients reorganize entire calendars not to do less, but to carry differently. I have seen them release roles that were never theirs and step more fully into the work that is. The body changes first. The strategy follows.
Signal emerges naturally once coherence is restored. Visibility no longer fractures integrity. Expression no longer requires self-erasure. When response-ability is carried by the right people, communication sharpens. Influence becomes regenerative. The work grows without devouring the one who carries it.
These movements are not sequential steps. They spiral. They repeat. They deepen.
Rest as rebellion remains meaningful. Rhythm as relief remains necessary. Relief alone does not strengthen the weave. The weave shapes how decisions are made, how teams are led, how commitments are chosen, and how devotion is sustained across decades without consuming those who carry it.
In Mayan geo-cosmovision, the Deer moves with awareness of terrain. Direction without integrity can become violence, the kind disguised as innovation, the rush to move fast and break what other people must live inside. Integrity without direction becomes stagnation, a reluctance to act even when the path is visible. Movement must be rooted.
When I was on city council, and later serving as Vice Mayor, I learned this in public life. Leadership was not absorbing every conflict or stabilizing every fracture. It was recognizing when someone was not standing in their capacity and expecting more from them. I would name what I could see and refuse to carry what was not mine. I would ask others to step forward, to expand into what they were already capable of holding. Capacity grows when it is seen and required.
Our ancestors remind us that leadership is not measured by how much one can endure, but by knowing how much one can carry, and when to ask others to expand in their capacity. This is how weight is redistributed without collapse. This is how new worlds are woven without replicating the old.
Empire accelerates while the climate destabilizes and communities fracture under pressure. The pace does not slow simply because we are tired. Meaningful work in this era requires longevity, and longevity depends on coherence, the kind that grows from rhythm rather than force. Rhythm requires discernment. It asks us to return, every so often, to the question beneath all of this: what is mine to carry, and what is not.
Decolonizing Time is relational. It is Time Ecology, a practice of living in right relationship with Time as a Being, with the land that holds us, and with the ancestors and descendants we are accountable to. It moves us out of extraction and back into reciprocity. Ecology begins with our bodies.
Relational repair reorganizes how response-ability is carried. It invites us to notice what we are holding, why we are holding it, and whether it is ours to carry. It repatterns inherited reflex so that devotion becomes conscious and chosen, allowing us to build bodies of work our bodies can inhabit without disappearance.
This is Nepantla.
Gloria Anzaldúa writes of Nepantla as the threshold where identities dissolve, and new configurations take shape, where the old story loosens but the new one has not yet hardened into form. It is an unstable space. A generative one. Those of us working at the edge of systems live there by default. We are between cosmologies. Between economic models. Between colonial inheritance and the glimmers of a world our well ancestors envision for us.
We are the between generations.
We carry the memory of what harmed. We carry the grief of what was severed. We carry the brilliance that survived anyway. And we stand in a position our grandparents did not have. Many of them endured. Many of them stabilized. Many of them carried beyond what was fair so that we would have more room.
To honor them does not mean to repeat their exhaustion.
In ancestral repair work, I have watched lineages reorganize in real time. When a burden is named and given back to its rightful place, when a story of martyrdom is released and replaced with consent, something shifts in Deep Time. The living stand differently. The well ancestors stand differently. The field itself feels less tight or more likely to rip. Our ancestors are not asking us to burn out in their honor. They are asking us to live further than they could.
Nepantla is not comfortable. It is where the bridge-builders stand, with one foot in the old world and the other sensing the new. It is where response-ability must be handled with clarity about what belongs to whom, because the structures around us are unstable, and the ones ahead of us do not yet exist. We are weaving while standing in the threshold.
This is why discernment matters now more than ever.
If we carry everything, we collapse.
If we don’t carry enough, the weave frays.
The Nepantla generations must learn to carry with discernment. To refuse inherited overextension. To allow urgency to loosen where it does not belong. To build rhythms that our children, our students, and our communities can inherit without harm.
Decolonizing Time is a practice of generational midwifery. It is the quiet work of redistributing weight so that the weave holds. It is learning to move like the Deer, aware of terrain, instinctive and grounded, rooted in relationship.
We do not yet know the full shape of what is emerging. But we know we are not here to replicate the structures that harmed us. We are here to weave differently.
The spiral continues.
For those who want to see the full weave, how this work moves through Ignite, Embody, and Signal in lived practice, I’ve written it out towards the bottom of the page here.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
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.
