Decolonizing Time with Ixchel Lunar

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 diagnosis: better boundaries, better sleep, a retreat, a week off. In my case, a sabbatical to Nicaragua that became a way of life. I’m for every one of them. And so many of us come home from a week off still tired, because the tiredness carried something a week off can’t reach.In my workshops, I put it this way. What we call burnout is often the body saying, "This pace isn’t resourcing me anymore." It shows up when we spend our life force without recovery, when care, creativity, and responsibility keep moving outward with nowhere to return. Life can look fine from the outside and still feel hollow inside. That’s not because you’re failing. And it isn’t a mindset problem. It’s a signal.When we use time as a tool of control, we burn our life force. I call that burning time: spending our life force trying to conform to time as control, instead of building a relationship with Time as kin. Burnout is the cost of living inside those systems, and the work, for me, has become refusing to break our bodies in the service of dominator culture.The Tiredness That Came Down the LineLast episode, I brought in Resmaa Menakem’s teaching that the body is a historical register, where unresolved harm settles when nobody has room to resolve it, and that trauma, stripped of context, starts to look like personality.Tiredness works the same way. Inside a family, it starts to look like a family trait, the thing everyone says about themselves without knowing where it started.Within a few generations, many of our lines lost land, language, ceremony, and the right to rest. That is the severing: the cut between our bodies and the rhythms and places that held them. Grief is what a body does with a loss like that. Colonial time left no room for it. In the United States, the Code of Indian Offenses made Native ceremonies a crime in 1883, and Native religious practice had no federal protection until 1978. I was seven. The ceremonies that held a community’s grief became crimes.In sessions, I teach that grief can move through a body and be witnessed. What settles in and stays is bracing against it, because the charge never discharges. Bracing is expensive. Brace for a season and it reads as exhaustion. Brace for generations and it reads as who we are.In the Rhythm Reset I teach, one of the five pathways is Soma Reverie, and it starts right here: habitual bracing, chronic tension or numbness, and writing from the sensation itself instead of the story we tell about it.So when I say burnout can be ancestral grief, I mean that some of our tiredness may be bracing that came down the line with the hurry, against losses no one in the line had the time to mourn.The Ache Is AncestralWhen I teach this live, I start by naming the ache: holding too much grief, family patterns that won’t dissolve, a life that looks good and feels hollow, always having to support it all with no support. That pressure in the chest and the weight in our dreams aren’t ours alone.You don’t need another strategy. You need to remember who holds you.As far back as I can remember, I could hear what others could not: the dead, the unborn, the ancestors close at hand. I stopped telling people because their responses were where I first felt how colonial time shames us, and how we shape ourselves in reply. I don’t name it because it’s rare or special. I name it because of what happens when we shame ways of sensing and knowing out of us. Many of us learned very early what was safe to trust and what… Get full access to Dragon 🐉 Letters from Ixchel Lunar at ixchellunar.substack.com/subscribe

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 reached children, drilling punctuality into them long before anyone paid for their hours, and it reached me there too. School was my first job. In my own taxonomy of colonial time, school is where most of us first meet Divided and Perfected Time: the day cut into periods, each cut marked by a bell, and a grade for keeping up.Some can even get paid for their grades like I did. After I had dropped out at 15, my dad paid 20 bucks for a straight-A report card when I went back. But I couldn’t stay in the system. I tested out at 16 and left home.For Indigenous children, the bell came with a weapon behind it. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania in 1879, and its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, summed up the mission in 1892 as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The boarding schools built on that model ran on bells and marching schedules, and the clock was one of the tools of the killing, because rising, eating, working, and sleeping by the bell was how a child got cut away from the rhythms of home. Punctuality has never been neutral.Tema Okun names a sense of urgency as one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture: the constant pressure that makes it hard to take a moment of time for oneself, to include people, to think long-term. School taught it to me as a virtue, and I was the child in trouble for being late.That pressure does not stay in the classroom. Byung-Chul Han calls it achievement society, where nobody needs a foreman anymore because we exploit ourselves and experience it as freedom. The bell stops ringing when school ends, and a lot of us keep hearing it for the rest of our lives, in the inbox notifications at nine at night and in the voice that says we should be further along by now. (Turn off notifications, sounds, and badges on your devices. When I hear them in Zoom calls I can tell what runs your life.)The Clock Had Them FirstThe inheritance my parents gave me was to follow the clock, and that inheritance came with abandonment, because they were never around. They were entrepreneurs and workaholics, and the clock had them first. My dad was early to everything, suit pressed and shirt starched, and he taught me to iron with military precision and called it impeccability, the protection a successful Brown man needed in a white world. Colonial productivity culture needed both of them at work, and a child learns the clock from the adults it takes away.Resmaa Menakem, who I trained with, teaches that the body is a historical register, the place where unresolved harm settles when nobody has the room to resolve it. Menakem also teaches that trauma stripped of its context starts to look like personality, and inside a family it starts to look like family traits. That is how inherited urgency works. It is urgency that was never ours, installed by colonial time and passed down through bodies and lineages until the hurry reads as who we are. Menakem’s book is called My Grandmother’s Hands, which brings me to my abuelita’s.The Sewing RoomIt was my abuelita who gave me the ancestral ways, and refuge from the urgency, even during the school year when I went to visit. Her house was where I could get away from all of it. Her house was like the sun, and we all orbited around it. The door was always open, neighbors came and went, and nobody stopped what they were doing when someone arrived. You just merged with what was happening in the house.Her sewing room was at the back of the house. You went down a hallway to reach it, and the doorway sat at an angle, so getting in felt like a tight, winding tunnel. Inside were stacks of fabric bolts in every style, child-like patterns, fancy grown-up silks and Guatemalan woven textiles hecho a mano.She traveled the world and came back with textiles from everywhere she went, and some of the silks were ones my father brought home from Osaka during the Vietnam War, for her to sew. You had to watch for pins on the floor with bare feet, and the room smelled like Chanel No 5 and starch. The machine was always humming, glowing under its light and pulling the fabric and us in as it went.She was always working on something, sometimes for me and sometimes for someone else, and as I got older she taught me to sew and make my own clothes. When she finished a project she hung it on the china cabinet in the living room, so whoever it was for would see it as they walked into the house. It was always magical, whether I was the one lit up by something made for me or the one watching someone else receive her gift, a child’s outfit, doll clothes, or one of the 10 wedding dresses with hand appliqué and beadwork, free of charge that took her months to make.Once we were inside that room, hours went by and we didn’t even notice. We were so immersed in what we were doing that Time just disappeared. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who gave Flow its name in psychology, described it as a state in which people are “so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter,” and counted the transformation of Time among its marks, hours passing like minutes.That room is where I first noticed how Flow worked, and where the Time immersion I talk about now became real to me. The dilly-dallyer at the bus stop and the child in Flow at the back of my abuelita’s house were the same child, which is what Kelly Diels {link} means by “Everything that was used against you can be your source of power.”Thompson had a name for the Time in that room, too: task-orientation, where work is measured by what the task needs instead of by the hours on the clock, and a piece is finished when it is finished. To anyone “accustomed to labour timed by the clock,” Thompson wrote, that way of working “appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency,” which is a fair description of how a dilly-dallyer looks from the bus stop.That older time held on longest in the home, in women’s work, and Thompson, who had already described seaport people who “attend the tides,” wrote that the mother of young children “attends to other human tides.” My abuelita kept that Time at a humming machine, in a magical room you reached through a tunnel, and when the work was done it went up on the china cabinet for everyone to see.Silvia Federici shows why that Time survived in the home when it was driven out of almost everywhere else. As capitalism took hold, the work of making and caring for people was pushed outside the wage and treated as nature instead of labor, so nobody bothered to put a clock on it. My colonial time taxonomy names this Gender-Extracted Time. The gifts on my abuelita’s china cabinet came out of those uncounted hours, made at the speed of the work and given away.The Thread of TimeI have written before that weaving is a Time practice, and I mean that literally: “The warp stretches from now into the future, while the weft interlaces the present and the past.” The Guatemalan textiles in that room carried more than pattern. During the genocide against the Maya in Guatemala in the 1980s, weavers used huipil patterns to carry messages in plain sight, past people who could see the cloth and could not read it. In the Cholq’ij, the sacred count of 260 days that Maya daykeepers still keep, B’atz’ is the thread of Time, and the count names each day by what it carries instead of by the hour. It’s one of the oldest ways of keeping Time on this continent, and it has outlasted five hundred years of bells. This episode goes out on 1 Q’anil, the day of the seed, the first day of a new count of thirteen.So I grew up between two times. Gloria Anzaldúa took the Nahuatl word Nepantla, the space between two bodies of water, for the place where you are neither this nor that, but are changing, and that is where a child lives who goes from the school bell to the sewing machine and back again. I carry both inheritances now, and I think it matters which line each one came down. One is the clock, which reached me through school and through the parents it took away, and reached me again this week in a letter. The other is the tunnel at the back of my abuelita’s house, where Time moved at the speed of the work and the finished piece hung where everyone could see it.This Week’s Micro-RefusalBack in December I wrote about choosing one micro-refusal of colonial time each day, and this week mine is about the passport. I’m not going to let this impediment move me into dysregulation. So much of what these systems teach us is dysregulation, a body kept on alert so the institution can set the pace. Menakem calls the counter-move settling, and a settled body is much harder to rush. The delay is real, the institution caused it, and the fix is theirs to finish, while my nervous system stays mine. I am certain everything will work out. (My bet is that it arrives with about a week left on my residency. lol.)My body was never a neutral instrument for the clock anyway. I am a sick person who works (I wrote a whole letter about it in April), and disability justice has a name for the Time my body keeps. Alison Kafer calls it crip time: “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” A passport office will not bend its clock for me this month, and I can still refuse to bend my nervous system to it.People sometimes hear “decolonizing Time” and picture me telling everyone to throw out the calendar and go live in a cave. (I get it. I also have a residency deadline.)  I recently commented on a TikTok video. A parent created a nine-grid Harada method for their newly adult son to begin adulting, and the time box had some issues. The vitriol of responses and projections at me from viewers was astounding. The concept of respecting other people's time is so ingrained. We are taught to forego our own capacity limits to meet others'.It has always been a yes/and: the date is real, and the pace my body keeps around it is mine. Báyò Akómoláfé put it in one sentence: “These times are urgent, let us slow down.”The PracticeOnce this week, find your own sewing room. Choose one thing you make or tend with your hands, put the clock where you can’t see it, and let the work end when the task is finished. Afterward, notice where the hours went, and where in your body the old hurry tried to come back. (of course, cap it at 90-120 minutes to protect your dopamine and capacity.)Until the passport comes, I’m keeping the other inheritance close, the one that smells like Chanel No. 5 and starch.Tell me in the comments, because I’d love to read these: when you were a child, where did the hours disappear?Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.With wild and rebellious love,Maltiox! xo IxchelP.S. If this episode stays with you, please give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show.(🦋 The blue on the podcast cover art is the blue of a morpho butterfly that flew past while I was choosing the color on the equinox.)P.P.S. Maltiox (mahl-tee-osh) is K’iche’ Maya for deep gratitude and sacred acknowledgment.✍🏽 Register for Sell It Twice, October 19th $197 →🌒 Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) →✍🏽 Meet OoSo Studio →👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏾 Ways to work with me...🎙️ Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or program…✨ Do Epic Shit. Stay Intact.Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in TransitionLand LineageI 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)Thanks for reading! If you loved it, tell your friends to subscribe.We may include other affiliate links in our content. Thank you for supporting our work.Please note that if you unsubscribe from my website, your subscription remains active on Substack until you unsubscribe from Substack. Apologies for any inconvenience.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. Get full access to Dragon 🐉 Letters from Ixchel Lunar at ixchellunar.substack.com/subscribe

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, registering as something else, in physical tension and sleep disturbance. Or that constant low-level alertness people carry. That split does real harm over time.It erodes trust in the perception of what our bodies are experiencing. Frantz Fanon wrote about this under colonial rule. He traced how domination works by destabilizing perception, training people to doubt what they see, feel, and know. That doubt doesn’t stay external. It moves inward. People start second-guessing their own reality. Their own timing. Their own sense of what’s happening.I feel like a lot of people are living inside that fracture right now. The training never ended. It scaled. It normalized. It got called resilience.Now it’s metrics, indicators, and economic narratives instead of overseers. You’re told things are fine. Strong. Improving. And when your body doesn’t experience it that way, the assumption is that you need to adapt faster. Be more flexible. Manage yourself better.I think a lot of people are living inside that gap right now. Between what they’re told and what they feel. Between the clock and their own sense of ancestral Timing.And that gap does real damage over time.I also think it matters who is feeling this for the first time, and who has been living inside it for generations.I feel like some of the people I work with are encountering something in their bodies that Indigenous, Black, and colonized peoples have been naming for a long time. Not the same thing, in the same way. But an encounter with the logics of colonization lands somatically, as their old buffers of privilege thin.I think this is part of what makes this moment so disorienting for a lot of white and otherwise privileged people. There’s a sense of shock. Of betrayal. Like the ground rules changed without warning. Like time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. And I feel like what’s actually happening is that the protections that once made colonial time feel abstract are thinning.Vanessa Machado de Oliveira talks about this as the loss of innocence that modernity depends on. The moment when the stories of progress, control, and inevitability stop working in the body. She’s clear that this is not shared suffering. It’s initiation without preparation. A reckoning with limits that other people were never allowed to forget.I think that’s why the panic feels so loud in some spaces right now. Why people scramble for certainty, for solutions, for someone to tell them how to get back on track. I feel like they’re not just afraid of collapse. They’re afraid of what it means to no longer be held outside of it.For many Indigenous peoples, there was never a stable “before” to return to. Capitalism didn’t arrive as a sudden shock. It arrived as an ongoing disaster. Nick Estes keeps pointing this out, and I need that reminder. What feels like an ending for some has been the water others have been forced to swim in for generations. No promised future. No clean horizon. Just continuity under pressure.That difference matters. It shapes who feels surprised by this moment and who recognizes it immediately.And I feel like part of what’s happening now is that colonial time is failing even the people it once protected.That doesn’t make this moment symmetrical. But it does reveal cracks.It exposes how deeply time itself was used as a tool of separation. Who was allowed to plan? Who was forced to survive? Who… Get full access to Dragon 🐉 Letters from Ixchel Lunar at ixchellunar.substack.com/subscribe