Matrilineal Time

I am writing to you from a train in Scotland.

After a mystical time in the South of England I arrived to Scotland several days ago. I have been dreaming about this time since Autumn, and got so emotional when I saw green hills approaching from the train window.

I can feel how my skin drinks up the moist in the air, alongside the thick layer of mythical landscape. Something between my tissues feels more alive here, more fluid, open for communication with different realms.

My mother and I spent couple of days exploring stone circles and stone engravings from the Neolithic period as well as the time of the Picts. It was one of the first mystical experiences we had together in Scotland (not sure why we waited for so long!), ridden with synchronicities and something that is, in all honesty, hard to put into words.

I will be sharing a more in depth England and Scotland experiences in my upcoming substacks.

For now, I wanted to share an invitation to join me in two (free) online workshops on Matrilineal Time. otherWise have kindly invited me to lead one of their otherWisdom cycles, so I decided we should explore the motherlines of time.
Join me on these two:

1. July 1st - Matrilineal Temporics

   Matristic and matrilineal civilizations of the ancient past had a profound relationship with time, Earth’s cycles, and those who governed them: the shape-shifting regeneratrix. Time was not perceived in a linear order of past, present, future. Here, time was geological, place-ridden, serpentine being, spiralling and coiling, returning once again with abundance, and not long after with death. Time was pulsing and alive, found in the hatching of the egg in spring, and decomposition of the compost in late autumn; found in the birth of new life, and the perishing of another. Tracking time was primarily an act of worship of the regenerative power of the living world: through megalithic constructions, bone inscriptions, spiral carvings, and clay figurines. Join us in this circle of Matrilineal Temporics to explore how ancient humans related to time as a sacred phenomenon, and to reconnect with the experience of time as lineage, relationality, spiral, devotion, and love.

   Register

2. July 9th - Reclaiming Fragmented Time

Time, body, and mind appear to deeply interconnected. However, if Matrilineal time is a spiral, then what happens when it is fragmented through continuous interruption, attention displacement, and jarring stimulation of the mind and the nervous system (something that Douglas Rushkoff calls “Present Shock”)? Is there a way to remember what time felt like before its endless dislocation?

In this session we will explore ways we un-intentionally fragment our experience and sense of time, how we can start healing our attention (time as state of mind/way of being), and directly re-mediate and re-weave time back into its sense of continuity.

Register

I wrote the essay below for otherWise to honour the theme of the cycle of Matrilineal Time, and wanted to share it with you before the upcoming two calls.

I think of the stone figurines, carved thousands of years ago, revering female bodies in all of their shapes. The great mother, the goddess, the life giver. Figurines with engravings of M’s, X’s, triangles, chevrons, and zigzags, excavated all across southeast Europe.

Figurines of reverence and remembrance, of worship and praise. Most of the times they were anthropomorphic, orienting us towards the time before we banished gods into the sky, before monotheism, before patriarchal domination took over. Women as birds, transforming into various animals and beings, beyond their humanly form. Adorned with symbols of cyclicality, regeneration, fertility, and animal power. According to Lithuanian mytho-archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the ancient matrifocal cultures of the Neolithic period were peaceful and egalitarian.

I think of stone circles and of tombs, slabs with never-ending concentric arches, labyrinthine meanders, and spirals — erected by ancestors in the ancient times. Built in alignment with larger sky bodies, such as Sun, Moon, and Venus. Many megalithic monuments were positioned to align with winter and summer solstices, allowing the light into the deepest parts of the chambers, signaling the return of life in the darkest period of the seasonal cycle. Light of the celestial bodies was at the epicenter of the architecture.

In 2025 study, scientists examined DNA of 131 individuals of ancient Çatalhöyük Neolithic settlement in Anatolia, buried in 35 houses, who lived 8000 to 5800 BCE. Yüncü et al. found that kinship patterns changed over time in this settlement, but individuals from the same houses or nearby ones were primarily related through the maternal line over dozens of generations. The authors write:

“Comparing genetic ties within and between buildings, we found that the maternal lineage had a key role in connecting Çatalhöyük household members, as represented by burials within each building. We estimated that 70 to 100% of the time, female offspring remained connected to buildings, whereas adult male offspring may have moved away. We also discovered preferential treatment of female infant and child burials, with five times more grave goods offered to females than to males.”

This was matrilineal time. Timekeeping through ritual as a tool of worship, reverence, and devotional creation. Time that spiraled and coiled like the snake goddess, infinitely generative, infinitely dying and being born anew. Here, daughters and sons were not separated into families through direct genetic lineage. Children belonged to the whole village.

The same minerals composing all of those ancient stones through which sacred waters sprung, are passed on from mother to child in gestation, and later in the after birth through nurturance with milk.

It is calculated that through the time of pregnancy and lactation, mothers gift us with around 10% of their minerals to their infants. To me, this speaks about the geological lineage that our mothers pass on to us, a certain forever-ness of existence, a trace of terrestrial memories. They imbue us with minerals, the undying matter, that are necessary for a small body of a child. Minerals, despite what we've been told, are not dead at all.

Later in life, we go on to acquire minerals from food and water streams (and various other exposures) coming from the larger body of the Earth. The mineral exchange and metabolism never stops — our bodies are marketplaces, rich with capacity to exchange and trade for what is needed the most, and where.

Upon our birth, each of us receives a bundle of gifts from our mothers: life itself and the capacity to metabolize this life, fully. But what if the dominant time we are born into disrupts these rhythms of life-metabolism? What if it is designed to exhaust us, to feel as if we are running out of time, the geological matter we are made of?

I stare into my screen, which shows the test results from the mineral analysis of my hair. It shows that two of my glands responsible for energy production in the body — the adrenals and thyroid — are in a deep burnout stage. Minerals, the graph says, are imbalanced.

I sought hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) as an alternative explanation of my health problems, low iron, hair fall, low energy, lack of focus, and so on. The mineral imbalance is nothing new to me; I have written about it before — the journey of detoxing excess copper from my tissues, due to the copper IUD.

However, for a long time, I didn’t know that minerals of our Earth have a deep interconnected relationship. Each of them interacts with one other, creating a web of dependencies. Through these intricate, invisible relationships, minerals create a matrix upon which life begins to grow.

Within the human body, there are two glands responsible for energy production: adrenals and thyroid. They work closely together, supplying the continuous stream of glucose, which becomes fuel for the cell. Glucose molecules go through the cell membrane, reaching mitochondria — organelles of the cell responsible for the cell’s metabolism. We inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, as they inherited it from their mothers.

The intergenerational transfer of mitochondrial DNA can be understood as an heirloom hearth, passed from mothers to their children to make sure that the fire, the agni, the continuous energy of the body, is always flickering.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates mutations more rapidly than nuclear DNA, partly because it has fewer protective mechanisms and is exposed to byproducts of cellular energy production. Estimates suggest that new mtDNA mutations arise at a rate of roughly one mutation every 20–30 generations, although the exact rate varies among studies.

A female fetus has approximately 6–7 million developing egg cells (oocytes) at around 20 weeks of gestation. Each oocyte contains hundreds of thousands of copies of mtDNA, often around 100,000 or more. Before birth, the number of oocytes declines substantially through a natural process called atresia, leaving about 1–2 million at birth.

During the formation and selection of egg cells, only a subset of mitochondrial genomes is ultimately transmitted to the next generation. This process, known as the mitochondrial bottleneck, can cause random shifts in mtDNA variants and contributes to genetic drift in mitochondrial lineages. With current scientific capacities and testing, we are able to trace our maternal lines, our common maternal ancestors, and their journey through Earth. The lineage that might seem to look like long threads from past into future, appears to be much more like an endless tapestry, woven upon an ancient loom.

20-30 generations translate into 500 to 800 years of history, encoded and passed down in murmurs and prayers. Continuous energy metabolism patterns that have seen so much (too much?), as if its own entity upon itself. Perhaps, my ancestral mothers are still very much alive within me. They, like me, were born into the changing times. And perhaps they, too, are tired.

I carry their inheritance, their heirloom mitochondria within in my body, seeking to thrive in the time that is engineered to collapse it.

Within the colonial-capitalist time paradigm, my time is fragmented, divided, segregated. So is my attention. Both time and attention are extracted from the body without a noticing. The loss of a sense of continuity creates the kind of stress that slowly freezes the body, an ongoing ‘now’ that lives very far away from the true present moment, something that Douglas Rushkoff calls a Present Shock. Rushkoff makes a case about technology segmenting our capacity to stay in the continuous flow of time, as if a river were dammed every 5 meters of its flow, continuously stuck in the engineered presence:

“Rather, we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to create a plan, and much less follow through on it, is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to the ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.”

But, in matrilineal time I am freed. I gather my attention from different corners of the Earth, from different places on the Internet, and I slowly and methodically reconnect the strings. Here, the quality of my attention is equated to my experience of time — time as a river. The previous dams are removed to allow continuous flow. And if rivers are equated to time, then we must take time through the same journey of the river's course.

From the inner most aquifers of the Earth's crust, to sacred springs and headwaters that used to be the primary sources of healing and nourshiment for people before modernity; to the confluence, and estuarine departure into the salt water – where the aquatic ecotones emerge.

Have you not felt time evaporate into the clouds, and catch you in the rain, leaving you drenched and speechless? Have you not been caught by the wild currents of time, galloping atop smoothed rocks, taking you right where you were supposed to be, floating you onwards? If time is a river, where does it emerge, where is it born? Because, as far as I know, every river has its birthpoint.

I am preparing the loom of energy for my future daughter, where her life is not run by depletion and calcification of her tissues. I am teaching myself to understand devotion on a somatic level. The body’s response to this unravelling of time becomes healing — everything that we had chased under the colonial, capitalist temporality, arrives unannounced as a byproduct of the matrilineal paradigm.

The exhaustion molds my body into a shape. A shape that points me towards the desires that lived unrecognized for years. The body asks me to follow where it’s been pointing me, and my exhaustion has made sure that this is the only path I have energy and time for. The heirloom mitochondria are asking me to transform the relationship with time within my body. An infinite line becomes an infinite coil.

Thank you for reading and sharing with your friends. Cannot wait to share more about my time in England and Scotland with you.

with love, Rūta