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.
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Beautiful Wildling,
There’s a self that has been with me my whole life. The one that looks out through these eyes and somehow feels merged with something much larger. It has been the ground under everything, steady and mine, except for a few seasons when it went into the goo state of a cocoon, where only the DNA knew what shape it was becoming.
My perimenopause started early, while I was grieving the loss of my center, my abuelita. It shifted my brain in ways that made coding and web development, of all things, uncomfortable. What had been my happy place, my easy drop-in Flow state, turned into impatience and rage (which was grief, buried).
So I adapted. I moved my energy into politics and poured the rage into Capricornian policy-making. Over several years, I became more of a politician and less of a hacker. If you don’t tend a skill, it withers. By the time my political career ended, my hacking had been dying on the vine, and at 40, I tried to pivot back to it, but nothing took. Going back to web development felt daunting.
Then came more perimenopause hell, a few more pivots, new things tried and set down, a move across five borders, burnout I finally had to heal, the discovery that other people wanted to learn how to drop into Flow and understand Time, learning my neuro-type, radical acceptance, gender-affirming care, HRT.
And somewhere in there, I began coming home. To web design first, through funnel building, then all the way back to code this year. My postmenopausal brain on HRT is like a Ferrari (I’m not being cute; look at the screenshot: 253 commits this June, and the month isn’t even over).
I started building for myself, then for my Stellar Impression clients, because the tools they actually needed didn’t exist. Off-the-shelf software has no idea what to do with a moon phase or a birth chart, and even less idea what to do with a voice like yours. So I built my own.
But the one tool I kept reaching for most is the one I think you need too, if you make things for a living: a co-author. One that reads your actual body of work (your essays, your frameworks, the years of notes you’ve been hoarding) and writes alongside you in your own voice, in your own key, so nothing you make leaks out to train someone else’s machine. Generic AI flattens everyone into the same builder white.
This one keeps your content coherent: every thread winding onto the same spindle, the one story at the core of your body of work, so what you publish weaves into one cloth over time instead of scattering into a hundred disconnected posts.
That is how OoSo Studio happened, and a whole Service-as-Software cooperative startup with it. The shape the DNA had been holding all along, finally legible.
When I show people what I’ve been building, they light up. And then, often enough that I’ve stopped being surprised by it, some of them assume the actual coding is coming from my partner Jaimey (he/they), who is a cis man. (He is also the person I had just shown that screenshot to, right after explaining what a GitHub commit even is.)
People are still quick to hand a man the keyboard.
That’s not a knock on Jaimey, my co-founder, the one who holds the systems and operations that keep the whole thing upright while I’m in the code. I build it, and they keep it running. OoSo needs both of us.
Here’s what I built… Your body of work stays on your own machine, off the cloud, where no one can see it or touch it. The data that has to live somewhere lives in France (where one of my most powerful healer ancestors lived, in Chamonix), on the servers of the country that’s moving its government off Microsoft and just moved to push Palantir (yes, the surveillance-for-ICE Palantir) out of its own intelligence service, in the name of sovereignty, out from under the US CLOUD Act. I went looking for the ground of that refusal, the place of my well-ancestors, and I built on it.
Coming home to me, this Cancer season. And then home went older than I planned.
I had one of the biggest shifts of my year this week. I went to a plática on Kuáti (Duality) from the Purépecha cosmogony, taught by Tatá Huichu Kuakari. It was an exploration of gender in that cosmogony, and it exposed something I had not let myself see: how the current label of Nonbinary is actually harmful.
In that ancestral language, the third gender, Kuáti, is a union of the other two genders.
For me, Nonbinary has always meant living outside the hetero-normative binary. A position held against a normative concept, when what I have wanted is an affirmative naming of what I am. Kuáti gives me that. It is a “more than that” way of saying who I am, and there is nothing diminished in it.
In Purépecha culture, erakukata, those who carry Kuáti traits, are considered gifted and precious.
To have a word for my identity that is affirming, Indigenous, and descended from my own ancestors’ language… that was a sense of belonging I didn’t expect this Pride season. Two-spirit isn’t something that belongs to my people, and I have never tried to borrow it. But I have longed for a name I know runs directly down that ancestral line. One that honors and remembers them, and what I carry within.
The DNA knew the shape all along. It just didn’t have the word yet. Now it does.
Which is the same reason I built OoSo.Studio.
Everything up there (the brain back online, the building, the refusal to let my voice or my lineage get flattened into generic AI output) is what OoSo Studio is made of. It’s the Service-as-Software I’ve been making for Founders with a real body of work: people who are done handing their voice to flat, generic tools, and who want their data, their lineage, and their rhythm kept intact and sovereign.
This is being “bootstrapped” without investors. It’s not being built for acquisition or IPO. We’re forming a consumer software cooperative, built for the people this whole extraction economy was designed to exploit, who decide to own the infrastructure instead. If that’s you, come see what we’re building inside OoSo.Studio.
Version 2 ships this week: new publishing tools across 11 of the platforms you’re already on, plus resonance data that shows how what you put out is actually landing (wired into Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and select CRMs). The door’s open. Come play with us.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If the next build weekend won’t work, sign up and shoot me an email to book your own build day.
P.P.S. Maltiox (mahl-tee-osh) is K’iche’ Maya for deep gratitude and sacred acknowledgment.
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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.
