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. 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 Healing Daniel 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? F**k 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 Hurry The 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 First The 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 Room It 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
