Dragon 🐉 Letter: You don’t have to wait for the sky to split. The festering, the ache, the crack itself is sacred ground.
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.
Olmec Heads at the Museo de Antropolgia Xalapa (MAX) photos by Ixchel Lunar
“What whiteness cannot tolerate is the crack that won’t heal into narrative… the festering crack reveals that all identities are provisional crystallizations barely holding together.”
— Bayo Akomolafe, Sidenotes on Whiteness
Beautiful Wildlings!
What an eclipse season! I can’t believe it’s been nine days since I’ve sent an email.
I finally visited the Olmec heads at MAX. There’s several giant ones and then many smaller ones along with huge stone altar thrones. At the base of one large stone artifact there was an offering of rosemary with red and black tzi seeds.
The museum is huge. The photo of the main corridor has several large rooms and patios with artifacts as well. I made it about 1/3 the way before melting.
What stood out to me was how deep culture and civilization go back in the Americas. The older I get, the longer back it stretches, and the more we learn.
Olmec heads were only recently “discovered” in the last century, from massive rockslides giving way to reveal them. This is why a beginner’s mind, curiosity, and Nepantla (the liminal space between, edgewalking) are ways of being that I continually practice.
The Sacred Refusal to Crystallize
Dominator culture rushes to name, define, and resolve. But the most sacred spaces are often the ones that remain ambiguous… still forming, still breathing in their own rhythm. Being revealed on their own Time.
I find myself living more and more in those spaces: the liminal, the festering, the unformed. Nepantla. Imox. That slippery place before meaning makes a mask.
Báyò Akomolafe writes, “What whiteness cannot tolerate is the crack that won’t heal into narrative.” That line hasn’t left me since I read it on his Facebook. Because the crack is where I live now. The places in my life and work that refuse to cohere, that defy polish, that haven’t yet “become” are the places where I’m learning to listen.
The festering is part of the field speaking. The ache is ancestral. And the story isn’t ready yet. Maybe it never will be. Maybe that’s the point.
Rapture and the Crack
Yesterday’s eclipse brought endings, cracks, and openings. And today, my feed is thick with viral Christian hype about tomorrow being the Rapture.
Every few years, there’s another prophecy like this. Another promise that the sky will split and the chosen will be lifted away. Rapture, manufacrured in the 1830s, is the same story of whiteness, about escape instead of presence, salvation instead of responsibility, waiting instead of creating.
It’s a story that’s allergic to cracks. It needs clean lines, firm beliefs, final chapters.
But here’s the truth: you don’t need to wait for Rapture. You can be your own Rapture, your own “Calgon, take me away.” You can be the rupture that breaks open the flatness of everyday time and lets something sacred flood into the here and now.
Awe as Medicine
My mentor, Joanna Macy, teaches that when we fully feel despair, it becomes a doorway into interconnection. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that awe is medicine, that it reconnects us to the more-than-human world, to Time beyond clocks and calendars.
Awe lifts us. Not away from the world, but deeper into it.
Byung-Chul Han warns that without ritual, life collapses into urgency and spectacle. The Rapture hype is a perfect example of that collapse: urgency without presence, spectacle without depth.
As Báyò also reminds us, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.”
Slowing down is its own Rapture. A rupture in the logic of empire. A remembering of the awe and creativity that empire tries to strip away.
Wild Presence Begins in the Crack
This brings me to the first pillar of the Wild Presence framework: Emerge. But not in the way empire means it, not as a debut or a polished reveal. Not as “finally figuring out your message” or becoming palatable to the algorithm.
Emerge is what happens when you refuse to close the crack. When you don’t rush coherence. When you let the festering speak. It is the womb space, the place before the pitch, before the redemption arc Before your trauma becomes a TED Talk or your ancestry becomes a neatly packaged wisdom offering.
It is the sacred mess, the rhythm returning in fragments, the nervous system still tremoring. It is where the ancestors whisper, but not yet in sentences. It is the field… still crackling, still voltage, not yet form.
Empire Can’t Hold the Unusable
Whiteness will tolerate almost anything except the festering. That’s what Báyò is naming in his latest writing on whiteness, how quickly dominant systems rush to translate the untranslatable. Even the most “inclusive” gestures still require the broken to be counted, categorized, or celebrated.
He writes, “Whiteness will even celebrate your crack as long as it can make it count. ‘Neurodiversity’ — your crack becomes a category. ‘Trauma-informed’ — your wound becomes a credential. ‘Lived experience’ — your fracture becomes expertise.”
But what about the parts of you that never cohere? That never become usable? That refuse to make meaning in ways empire can monetize?
The Crack That Opened Me
This eclipse season has been thick with psychic dust, the fragments of what’s ending, clouding our vision. And yet I keep coming back to the buckle that cracked me open over a decade ago: when I stopped trying to “manage time.”
No productivity hack, no habit stack, no color-coded planner could fix what was happening in my body. I was collapsing. My nervous system was cooked. I had thought the answer was discipline, but empire’s discipline was more poison. The answer wasn’t a better system. It was surrender.
This eclipse brought that memory flooding back. The Sun and Moon conjoined in Virgo, across from Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, pulled us into the tension between control and dissolution. Virgo’s obsession with systems met Pisces’ longing to dissolve. And the trine to Uranus and Pluto added this: you don’t get to finesse this with surface fixes. Something deeper is emerging. I’m letting it.
What It Means to Emerge
This is what I mean by Emerge. It’s not performance, clarity, or cohesion. Emerge is messy, cracked open, sacred. It’s not something to rush. Not a moment to brand. It’s a long, slow unwinding. An underground swell.
And you might be feeling it in ways that aren’t easily narratable. Anxiety, restlessness, the sudden urge to clean out your inbox or redesign your schedule. But no system will satisfy what this eclipse is shaking loose. Because the real transformation isn’t happening in your calendar. It’s happening in your nervous system. In your lineage. In the rupture.
Colonial Time Is the Lie
Colonial time equates productivity with worth. It teaches us to override our exhaustion, to ignore the thresholds our bodies are begging us not to cross.
It whispers that value is in what we produce, and healing is only valid if it can be explained.
But eclipses like this expose the lie. You don’t need to manage time better.
The problem isn’t your lack of discipline. The problem is that empire taught us discipline was the cure, when in fact it was the disease. Saturn in Pisces whispers shame. Neptune adds confusion. And we are left trying to spiritualize the grind, to make the cage feel sacred.
But depletion isn’t your fault. Your body isn’t broken. Empire’s time is.
This eclipse doesn’t ask us to control more. It asks us to reckon. Virgo wants embodied ritual. Pisces wants a connection to the infinite. Together they say: presence is the practice. Rhythm, not control.
A New, yet Ancient Way to Be With Time
This is what I mean when I speak of Wild Presence. It is not a tactic or a productivity framework.
This is the work of Wild Presence… to trace the maps of Indigenous ecological Timeways written in your body. To let your rhythms, your ancestors, and the living Earth guide how you move through days. To notice the eclipse not as a cosmic drama “out there,” but as an invitation to remake how you inhabit time.
Over a decade ago, I walked away from the gospel of optimization. I began walking with Time instead of against it. Through illness, exile, re-matriation, and ancestral reckoning, I dismantled every story empire gave me about value, urgency, and what it means to emerge.
I’ve sat in caves of collapse and rebuilt rhythm from the inside out. I’ve mentored others through this same threshold… not by handing them a new planner, but by holding space while they reawakened to their own cyclical breath. Sometimes, nothing needed to be planned. Just grieved. Or composted. Or sat with.
When the Embodied Leads
One client arrived in constant fight-or-flight, her body wired to urgency. In three months of reclaiming rhythm — mapping her natural cycles, weaving in Soma Reverie, aligning work with lunar tides — she shifted into leading with ease. Revenue steady. Health restored. Her community told her, “Your whole presence feels different.” That’s what happens when you stop managing time and start befriending it.
I’ve mentored leaders, healers, and visionaries through this same shift, not by handing them a Flow hack, but by guiding them back to the Timeways already inscribed in their bones.
If You’re Festering, You’re Not Failing
So if this letter finds you festering, not forming… you’re not failing.
If your gifts feel unfinished or unshareable, if your healing refuses to become a lesson… that is the field speaking.
The crack is sacred. Emerge through the ache, not the arc.
An Invitation to Root, Not Rise 😜
Tomorrow, I’ll be guiding a live workshop called Psychic Dust to Sacred Ground. We’ll clear what isn’t ours. Compost what empire left behind. And remember awe… not as escape, but as medicine. Not spectacle, but slow return. Not rapture that lifts us away, but one that roots us more deeply.
And if you’re feeling called to stay in this rhythm, to remember your way back to sacred Time, I have space for two more 1:1 Wild Presence clients. But this isn’t about launching into something new. It’s about unfolding into what’s already calling you… through the crack, through the rupture, into the possibility of deep now.
Explore if this is your next step, and if so, then book a coffee chat with me.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. This eclipse season is still humming. If you’re craving ritual, reflection, or just a space to sit with the dust that hasn’t settled, Psychic Dust to Sacred Ground is happening live on Tuesday. We’ll move slowly, together. Bring your ache. Let it speak.
P.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.
