Mirror in the Sky
Dragon 🐉 Letter #123: Time make you bolder. Resmaa Menakem, Unpermission. Ungovernable. Fugitive.
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.
Mirror in the Sky, What is Love?
Can the child in my heart rise above?
…Time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older too…
— Stevie Nicks, Landslide
Beautiful Wildling,
I woke up dreaming of Stevie Nicks and Landslide this morning and knew something was being born in me today. This song always does this to me.
Resmaa Menakem came by the Quaking circle today.
Just for half an hour (we’re reading Quaking in America together, in a small somatic group that meets to do the work, not to talk about doing the work). It’s been about a year since the last time I sat in a room he was leading. I’ve been doing my reps. Somatic abolitionism is something you metabolize over years, not a certificate you frame. (Though I have those too.)
But hearing his voice again, in real Time, watching the faces of the other people in the circle as they listened... something rearranged in me.
He spoke about birthing.
That this work (the deconditioning and decolonizing, the slow return to a primal self most of us cannot quite recognize when we meet it again) is a birthing. From the Blackness of the womb, the Blackness of the tomb, he kept saying. The Blackness that is fertile, not final.
That we are putting our reps in now so that when the shit hits the fan, we are already conditioned for more. (We don’t know what that “more” is yet. That is the point. We are birthing it.)
His rhythm was about Unpermission. Ungovernable. Fugitive.
Stephen King once wrote that we fall from womb to tomb, ”from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other... except through faith.”
Valarie Kaur asked a different question, that fated November night after the first Orange election:
What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?
What if all the mothers who came before us... are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear: *You are brave?* What if this is our Great Contraction before we birth a new future?
Remember the wisdom of the midwife: ”Breathe.” Then: ”Push.”
I sat with all of that. And I sat there thinking about you (the Beautiful Wildlings who read these letters, the people building this kind of work into your livelihoods).
Some of you are exquisite at what you do. I mean it. The depth of training, the years of practice, the discernment, the integrity. You are the practitioners I send my own beloveds to.
And some of you cannot fill your programs right now. Cannot find the clients. Cannot get the bodies in the room (or the dollars in the bank, or the relief of knowing the next month is covered).
Your work is worthy. Sometimes it is exactly the work the world is missing right now.
It is the marketing that isn’t carrying the feeling. Because marketing is the amniotic water we squirm in.
Here is what I came home with, walking around the house with coffee going cold in my hand:
We are birthing a future that the colonial imperialist economy does not get to permission. Our marketing belongs to the labor for each other.
Flat copy is tomb copy. The right words are on the page (regulated nervous system, embodied leadership, somatic practice), but they are doing the wrong thing. They are flattening the work into a category. Skating over the surface of something that lives in marrow. They sound like a brand that has its hair done and its nervous system tucked in, while the body underneath is in active labor.
Labor is messy and wet. Birthing is Lilith, wildly writhing a Plutonic transformation that is unseen until it is.
That contradiction is what people feel even when they can’t name it. The right ones, especially.
People aren’t hiring strangers right now. The economy is doing what colonial imperialist economies do under stress (clenching, contracting, hoarding, blaming).
Discretionary spending is bone-thin. Folks are scared. And when people are scared, they don’t give their last good dollar to a brand. They give it to a person who sounds like they’re in the same labor.
So I continue to bring more of myself into my marketing. Do you feel me?
I’ve been writing about the work. I have not been letting you feel me doing the work, in real Time, while I write to you. I have not been letting you in on what hurts me, what I’m tracking in my own body, who I’m grieving for, who I’m rooting for, whose unfilled program I cannot stop thinking about this week.
The womb-not-tomb teaching landed in me sideways, because my body has done this before. When Resmaa spoke of birthing, a memory of another visceral dream came flooding back in.
When I was pregnant with my second child, the one who wouldn’t settle on a gender, who left me wondering what I was going to have, and showed me we could be more than a single gender.
In the dream, I was laboring, and when it was time to push, I reached down and pulled myself from my womb. I looked at them looking at me.
I shared this dream with my midwife. And when the day came, she had me reach down and pull my baby from me and onto my chest. That was one of the most powerful acts of agency of my life. It was a resurrection and an undoing of the sexual confinement and conditioning of being trafficked as a teen. Shortly after this, I took my life back.
I tell you this because the gesture is the same. Reaching into your own labor and pulling forward what is already arriving. That is what this moment is asking of me, here, on the page. And of you, in your work.
That changes here. Toward presence (the story is never the spectacle, but the presence is the whole point). Toward labor breath. Toward a voice that admits it’s in the contraction with you.
If I’m asking you to bring your full body into your business, and I’m sending you copy from a brand voice that is too composed to be in labor, I’m contradicting myself.
So here, today, this is me. A little blown open. Hopeful in a wild way. Unpermissioned. Ungovernable on the page.
If you are a practitioner whose programs are not filling right now (and you are doing real work, the kind that costs something to do), I see you. I am thinking about you. I want to do this in the open with you over the coming weeks. Let me know how I can support you in your birthing.
Reps in. Breathe in. Push when it’s time.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
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.