I Traveled Back in Time
Field Notes № 03 · June 2026 · Teotihuacán, Mexico. Originally published on LinkedIn.
I was standing at Teotihuacán when it happened.
Not a thought. Not an insight. Something older than both.
I felt roots come from my feet, into the ground. My head lifting. My chest open, lungs full, like my body remembered something my mind had been trying to articulate for years.
And I could see it. Right there, in the ancient city laid out before me.
People working together. Delegating. Protecting. Laughing. Resting. Being in life, not preparing for it, not earning the right to it, not waiting for permission to inhabit it.
I stood there and I thought: this is what we lost.
Not the monuments. Not the civilization. Not even the knowledge — though that too.
We lost the understanding that life moves in cycles. That the earth gives and we tend and the earth gives again. That rest is not the absence of productivity. It is the condition for it. That you cannot pour endlessly without being replenished. That no living system — not a person, not a community, not a forest — survives permanent extraction.
Our ancestors knew this. Not as a philosophy but as a practice. As the organizing logic of entire civilizations.
And then it was taken.
Not all at once. Over centuries. Through conquest and conversion and the slow replacement of one cosmology with another.
A cosmology that said time moves in a line, not a circle. That the earth is property, not kin. That the body is a tool, not a temple. That worth is measured in output. That rest is earned, and only then.
We inherited that world. Most of us were born inside it and never knew another was possible.
But our bodies remember.
I think about this every time I walk into a room of educators, youth workers, community leaders — people who have given everything they have to the work and cannot understand why they are empty.
We call it burnout. And it is. But it is also something older.
It is what happens to beings built for reciprocity when they are placed inside a system of extraction. When the ancient knowing — tend the land, the land tends you; care for each other, be cared for in return — has no place to live. When every instinct toward rest, toward receiving, toward slowing down is met with a culture that says: not yet, not here, not you.
For people of color, this is sharper. We are the most recent descendants of the civilizations that held this knowledge. It lives in us, in our bodies, our traditions, our ways of gathering and mourning and celebrating. And we are asked, every day, to work inside the exact system that dismantled it.
Of course we give until there is nothing left. We were made for reciprocity. We just aren't living inside any.
What if that is the missing piece?
Not the days off. Not the wellness stipend or the boundaries workshop or the self-care protocol.
The connection. To ourselves. To each other. To the seasons. To the understanding that we are not machines designed to produce. We are living beings designed to participate in a cycle that includes rest, that requires it, that cannot continue without it.
What if burnout is not a personal failing or even an organizational one but the entirely predictable result of severing people from the very thing that made regeneration possible?
I don't have a program for this. I want to be honest about that.
What I have is a practice of creating space for people to feel, maybe for the first time in a very long time, what it is like to be back in their own bodies. To listen inward. To remember that their wisdom did not come from a training or a credential. It was always there. Ancient. Intact. Waiting.
That moment at Teotihuacán — roots from my feet, chest open, lungs full — that was not a new feeling.
It was a homecoming.
And I believe that is what the people in our rooms are hungry for too. Not information. Not tools.
Remembrance.
We can come home. It is still there. It has always been there.
It is our birthright.
Sources & further reading
For those who want to walk further in — the scholarship stands beside the knowing, not above it.
Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Vine Deloria Jr. — God Is Red: A Native View of Religion
Patrisia Gonzales — Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing
Alfredo López Austin — The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas
Anthony Aveni — Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico
Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Gloria Anzaldúa — Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
This piece first appeared on LinkedIn, June 2026. Field Notes is where Working With Delia documents what real engagements and the field are showing — connected to research, national frameworks, and the older knowledge systems this work descends from. If this stirred something, start the conversation.
