Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar Podcast Summary — Free Daily Recap

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1 weeks ago16 min
Ep. 3: Is our burnout ancestral grief?
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 f**k. Still cozy in the chaos.This letter is also episode three of my podcast, Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar, a read-aloud of my Dragon Letters. Press play at the top to hear me read it, or follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.Because not citing is epstemicide, you can see my citations and links in the original Substack.I would be ever grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. Email me your screenshot, and I’ll send you a super secret recording of a Befriending Time practice.Offerings now have their own section, Ixchel’s Offerings, and you’re in it. If you’d rather get only the Dragon Letters, go to substack.com/settings, choose Dragon 🐉 Letters from Ixchel Lunar under Subscriptions, and uncheck Ixchel’s Offerings.This is Decolonizing Time. Today is 3 Ajmaq.Hola Beautiful Wildlings!I have a new passport! And right after I got it, I went to the AT&T store to provide my two forms of ID, the blood of my second-born child (I joked to the clerk about giving my blood; she didn’t flinch), and the API to my Claude account to unlock my phone. Mexico has a new law requiring ID to have a cellular account. I have a lot of feels about that.I’m not sure which was worse, not having a passport for 3 months or not having cellular service for 2 months.My photo turned out well, though.In episode two, I asked whose hurry I inherited, and I followed it back to a school bell and a bus I kept missing. This week I’m following the other half of that inheritance, the part that settles in after the hurry has run us for long enough: the tiredness.When I moved to Nicaragua, I was totally exhausted, totally burned out. I was my own client in so many ways. For the next two years, I asked what I had learned, what my skills were, and what was trying to come through me, and Time was the thread woven through it all. That is where I arrived.It was one of many burnouts. One came three years before Nicaragua, in early 2014, after I left city council and after my run for Congress. I know what it means to girlboss too close to the sun. I was in elected office (city council in 2009, then the Golden Gate Bridge District, then vice mayor, and put 30,000 miles on my Honda running for Congress in 2011-12), moving in the way that reads as competence and costs things you don’t notice until the bill arrives all at once.Losing two races in 6 months (the congressional seat I had been striving for 20 years and then re-election to city council) led to a time of challenges and confusion, a period of unmasking my neuro-emergence and discovering the power of setting boundaries and saying no.Part of it was that when I lost the seats, I needed to find full-time work, and I was 40. I was basically unhirable. The jobs went to younger, skinnier white women.I faced extreme exhaustion and suicidal depression, and that collapse became the ground this whole body of work grew from. I called it burnout back then, because that was the word everyone had. I think now that a lot of what I called burnout was grief. Grief for seeing the brokenness of what was, and what could have been.My own rupture began in exile from my homeland and my lineage, and I felt the weight of burnout in my body. That’s when things started to change. I began to notice that the ache wasn’t only mine. It was bigger than me, and following it led me back to my ancestors. Over time, that noticing became a living practice rooted in protection, ritual, and returning to belonging, and it’s the ground of my Ancestral Wayfinding work.A Word That Keeps the Problem in UsBurnout is a young word for an old exhaustion. The psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined it in 1974, writing about volunteers at a free clinic in New York who were being worn down by the work. In 2019, the World Health Organization gave it an official definition: a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”Has not been successfully managed. By whom? The sentence puts the failure on the person doing the managing, and the Culprit stays offstage, which is exactly where colonial productivity culture likes to stand. (A definition can be accurate and still pick a side.)The fixes on offer match the diagnos
Sep 27, 202617 min
Ep. 2: Whose hurry did I inherit?
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.I would be ever grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. Email me your screenshot, and I’ll send you a super secret recording of a Befriending Time practice.Something worth your attention before we begin.Ancestral Lineage HealingDaniel Foor’s Ancestral Lineage Healing runs September 28 through December 14, and it is the slow, real work of tending the ones who came before you until they can hold you again. If you register, use my personal code: thrivalist50 for $50 off.This is Decolonizing Time. Today is 1 Q’anil.Hola Beautiful Wildlings!This week, a letter came back to me instead of my renewed passport.My one-page renewal was supposed to be processed in Guadalajara within a few weeks. Somewhere along the line, there was a hiccup, and my application went to the States instead. The US consulate kept saying they would send updates, and then a letter arrived saying there was a hold.I need that passport for my permanent residency application next month, when my residency expires, so we spent two days on the phone getting a hold lifted so the renewal can move again. The hold came from the IRS dropping the ball back in March, but we only discovered it now. It looks like it will lift soon, but it still feels awful. (Saturn is transiting my twelfth house right now, the house of prisons, and it feels as though my passport is being held hostage.)In episode one of this podcast I leaned on Achille Mbembe, who writes about modern power as something that governs time as much as territory, h/t to Estelle Ellison for “Foreclosed Time,” about how much time is taken from us by these institutions, and I kept asking questions in that spirit: who waits, who moves, who burns out. This week I’m the one waiting.The sociologist Javier Auyero did fieldwork in the waiting room of a welfare office in Buenos Aires and called the people there patients of the state, because being made to wait, again and again, is how an institution teaches you where the power sits. I think anyone who has stood in line for papers learns this in the body long before they read it in a book.The passport itself is a youngin. The identity document as we know it only took its modern shape after the First World War. Sociologist John Torpey traced how nation-states made themselves the owners of what Torpey called “the legitimate means of movement.” Before that, people moved (illegitimately? Fuck that.) across continents for thousands of years on their own feet and their own calendars. I rematriated to my ancestors’ homeland, and I still need a state’s paper to live here.What I felt on those calls was institutional urgency, the kind that arrives on somebody else’s clock, from an office in another country, while my body does the carrying. The institution makes me wait and makes me hurry at the same time (wait for the update, hurry to produce additional documents), and I know that pairing well, because it was the first urgency I ever learned.The First HurryThe first hurry was school. Before I started, I spent most of my days with my abuelita, Grandma Bea, because both my parents owned businesses. Then school began, and I had to learn the clock, and learning it was hard. I’ve talked before about being a Gen X latchkey kid, getting myself to and from school in second grade onward and always running for the bus. I was getting my brother out the door too, every morning, on our own, and I often missed the bus and walked to school late. My mother called me a dilly-dallyer.The grown-up version of that word is “time blindness,” which people still reach for. I retired it. I call it Time immersion now, which feels more apt to my relationship with Time.In 1967, the historian E. P. Thompson published an essay called “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” about how whole populations were taught to live by the clock once their hours could be bought and sold. Thompson traced the school as one of the first places that time-discipline re
Dec 14, 202521 min
Ep. 1: The Clock Is Cracking. Your confusion makes sense.
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 f**k. Still cozy in the chaos.Beautiful Wildling,I feel like something is off with time. I keep noticing it, and then noticing myself noticing it, like I’m clocking whether I’m the only one.I don’t mean Time. Not the big thing. Not the ancestral, rhythmic, relational kind. I mean the everyday time we’re supposed to live inside. The clock time. The schedule time. The kind that tells you you’re late, behind, falling short, even when nothing obvious is wrong.I think most people feel it, even if they don’t talk about it this way. It shows up as disorientation more than panic. Days blur together. Planning feels strange, like it asks for a confidence people don’t actually have right now. The future feels thin. I keep coming back to that word. Thin. Not gone. Just hard to lean on.I hear people say they feel late all the time. Late to what, they’re not sure. I think that part matters. Tired, even when they’ve rested. Anxious, but not about one clear thing. I feel like there’s this constant background hum of urgency, but no destination attached to it. Just pressure. Just pace.The clock keeps moving. Of course it does. Meetings still happen. Calendars still fill up. Deadlines still exist. I’m not pretending we’re outside of that. But I think fewer people trust this version of time than they used to. Or maybe they never did, and they’re only starting to notice now.I feel like something quietly broke in our relationship with Time, and we’ve been blaming ourselves for it.I think that’s why so many people say things like, “I should be able to handle this,” or “Other people seem fine,” or “Maybe I’m just bad at managing my time.” I hear that a lot. And every time I do, I feel like what they’re actually pointing to isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a mismatch. A tempo problem.I don’t think this is burnout the way we’re usually told it is. It’s older than that. Structural. Like we’re living inside a pace that stopped making sense, but we’re still being asked to obey it anyway.And I think that kind of obedience does something to people, slowly.I don’t think this is a personal failure. It isn’t. I feel protective of that truth.I say that knowing how early so many of us were trained to feel behind.I think about this a lot through my own body. I was a Gen X latchkey kid. Second grade. Getting myself to and from school. Watching the clock. Forgetting to watch the clock. Catching the bus. Running for it, actually. Always running for it. Late for the bus. Late to class. Late in that quiet, constant way where I never quite settle, but always feel rushed.I feel like that did something to my nervous system early on. Trained it to scan. To hurry. To assume I was already behind before I even knew what I was supposed to be ahead of. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think a lot of us learned colonial time as pressure long before we learned it as “normal.”That’s why I don’t buy the idea that what people are feeling now is just burnout, or poor time management, or individual overwhelm. I feel like those explanations miss how deep this goes. Something got set in motion long before any of us had a chance to opt out.I keep coming back to modernity and how it taught us to experience time as a straight line instead of a living field. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures) names this so clearly. She talks about modernity as a project that fractures our relationship with time, land, ancestors, and continuity. A project that keeps people in a state of permanent insufficiency. Always behind. Always catching up. Always oriented toward a future that never quite arrives.I feel that in my body when planning starts to feel impossible. When even imagining a few months ahead carries a subtle sense of failure, as if whatever I choose will already be wrong somehow. Too late somehow.In that framework, colonial time stops being something you belong to. It becomes something you manage. Something you race. Something you lose.That’s why, when the official story insists everything is stable while lived experience says otherwise, the rupture doesn’t show up first in data. It quietly shows up in your senses, regist

About Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar

Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar: my field notes on Time, body, and lineage for anyone done with urgency that was never theirs. Ancestral, cyclical, spiral Time, the Maya Cholq'ij calendar, decolonial astrology, and the rhythm rituals that get your nervous system out of busy and back into a deep relationship with Time. AuDHD, Flow, and managing health challenges come up a lot. We don't have to manage Time, we can befriend it.I'm Ixchel: a decolonial cosmologist, High Flow coach, and ancestral medicine guide. A neuroemergent, queer, Kuáti (Purépecha third gender) elder and former vice-mayor, twenty-five years guiding visionary misfits with rhythm rituals and animist joy (and the occasional f-bomb). Some episodes grow out of my Dragon Letters, the newsletter. Flow is your birthright. Do epic sh*t. Stay intact. ixchellunar.substack.com

By Ixchel Lunar (they/them)

Religion & Spirituality Spirituality Philosophy Culture Society & Culture

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