Dragon Letters #16
Cancer Moon Edition
December 21, 2021
Hola my dear friend,
On Saturday 12/11, I met with my cohort of Bayo Akamolafe’s course where we’ve been exploring the remains of an enslaved woman found in Brazil and named after Saint Josephine Bakhita.
Our project became a working of bones, the bones of a friendly sloth visitor, name Lisa by our neighbors, that was killed by some neighbor kids in March. She was stoned out of a mango tree down the hill from us. Her injuries were bad. Our neighbors asked us to take her in to recuperate, but she passed away the next day before the veterinarian could come.
I buried Lisa in March and then reclaimed her a few weeks ago. The children stoning her out of the mango tree had broken her back (I found the broken vertebrae and it became the center of the mandala).
This video was a collaboration over zoom to create a despacho of her bones and shit to honor her and Bakhita’s bones. Our Bakhita cohort #8 found we were very comfortable with sitting together in silence as we explored this work over the course of several months. We shared this in Bayo’s class on 12/12 and it was very moving and healing.
This was a group project from We Will Dance With Mountains Into The Cracks a course from Emergence Network. This article describes the discovery of the bones named after Saint Josephine Bakhita in Brazil.
Below are more resources from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, a group that upended my thinking in late 2019. Vanessa spoke with Bayo’s participants on 12/12 as we explored modernity’s fear of shit, literally and figuratively.
I’ve shared how blessed I feel when the perezosos (sloths) come to poop in our sanctuary. I even received a delightful pile of perezoso poop on my 50th birthday, a perezoso friend had saved it for weeks and “coincidentally” dropped it that day.
That the perezosos feel safe enough to climb down from the canopy tops and let it all go here gives me all the feels. And when I share this, I always notice how some people respond, uncomfortably so, nervously curious. Can you be with the bones and shit? If so, read on and fall into the cracks shared within.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
xo Ixchel
P.S. tl;dr
On the darkest day of the year when Pluto and Venus in retrograde sit on my Venus in Capricorn with the moon opposing, I bring more sobriety as we are working with bones and shit, digging deep into the things that make us uncomfortable in these Times. Staring boldly into the cracks and jumping in head first.
If you’re bold enough, join us for Decolonizing Time + Rest Revolt on 12/27 to disturb your colonial roots as we make way for what comes from the composting of this coloniality. Payment plan available.
“Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is a Latinx professor at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change. She began her career as a teacher in Brazil in 1994 and has since led educational and research programs in countries including the UK, Finland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Brazil, and Canada.”
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti
“This book is rude. Like the shaman’s confident cackle. Like the punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster’s feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. And right there—my fellow modern citizen—right there, in the author’s cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of white modernity. Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to something else. It is time to gather. We can start here, together.”
— Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
“This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of [read 101 ways to avoid dealing with shit].
“Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?
“Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance–the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker–and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:
• Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
• Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
• Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
• Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism [read more about the ESCAPE framework here]
• Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
• Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness
“For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.”
“Andreotti works across sectors in international and comparative education, particularly focusing on global justice and citizenship, Indigenous and community engagement, sustainability, and social and ecological responsibility. Her research examines relationships between historical, systemic, and on-going forms of violence, and the inherent unsustainability of modernity. Andreotti is one of the founding members of Gesturing Decolonial Futures Collective [read about GTDF Shit storm framework and cartography here] and Teia das 5 Curas, an international network of Indigenous communities mostly in Canada and Latin America. She currently collaborates with with these groups to direct research projects and learning initiatives related to global healing and wellbeing in times of unprecedented challenges.”
How we can work together:
Stellar Strategy 1+1 90-minute session and Rest Revolt Handbook (shorter choose-your-adventure session)
Decolonizing Time + Rest Revolt Dec 27 – 31st
(virtual collective sit-out to go deeper in practices to (un)busy your life)
1+1 1/2 day Boundless Vision Retreat with 1 prep and 1 follow up sessions (Foundational planning session to center Flow, rest and play)
1+1 1/2 day Stellar Strategy Retreat with 1 prep and 1 follow up sessions. (Longer choose-your-adventure session)
Wild Presence Year-long 1+1 coaching program (alchemical, non-linear, agile process to bring you back to re-membering how to live with Wild Presence)
✨ Client Love ✨
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Land Lineage
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 jungle, the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Matagalpa, past present and future, in what is known as Matagalpa, Nicaragua.
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.S.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgement, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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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.
