🌿 Colonizers, Colonized, and the Field We Hold Together

Last night, our storytelling and deep listening circle gathered around the theme of paradox in Spiritual Elderhood:

“Perhaps this is the essence of Spiritual Elderhood: not solving the paradoxes, but holding them until they ripen into quiet joy.”

Eight of us came together, and the space was filled with gratitude, kindness, presence, and love. We left feeling held, celebrated, and connected — an art of the heart that cannot easily be put into words.

Yet one story continues to ripple through me this morning.

One grandmother spoke of her parents “crossing the railway tracks,” as she called it — a tender way of describing death to the old and stepping into a new path in life) — and of her guilt about being a descendent of colonizers. I felt the depth of her struggle. It reminded me of what I wrote in A Listening Grandmother, Chapter 48: Faultlines – From the Personal to the Global.

This theme of colonisers and the colonised has surfaced strongly in our circle, somehow. It is also part of my own lineage. My ancestors were colonized. Others in our circle carry the weight of being colonizers. How do we hold these histories, these inherited burdens?

This morning, in a 1-on-1 conversation,  Gloria shared from her own story as a Filipina:

• “I come from a country colonized by Spain for 300 years and by the USA for 46 years, not to forget the Japanese invasion from 1941–1946. We have this joke describing Filipino culture: Filipino culture is like a nun raised in Hollywood. The Spanish colonized us with the cross, and the US with the pen.”
• “My maternal grandmother, of Spanish descent, prided herself on being one of the first women who learned to read and write. During the Spanish era, education was for the privileged few. It was only in the American era that education was introduced widely. So in a way, we are grateful for this part of our colonial history.”

Her words reminded me that history is never simple. Colonization carries both pain and paradox. It wounds, it distorts, it silences — and yet it also leaves behind unexpected gifts, like education or cultural exchange.

Another grandmother’s story reminded me of a different but related paradox. She spoke of truth-telling: how easily we can slip into half-truths or white lies, often as shadows of self-protection, and how different that is from choosing to hold back words so as not to wound another.

It is a delicate edge — between deception that clouds the Field, and restraint that protects it. Both arise in family lines shaped by colonizing and being colonized, where silence can be either a wound or a form of care.

And so I return to the Field we tend together. Guilt cannot heal these histories, nor can denial.

Whether our ancestors colonized or were colonized, our task is to tend the Field: to listen, remember, discern, and release — so that our grandchildren and the generations to come may breathe in a lighter field than the one we inherited.

This is the work of Spiritual Elderhood. We do not need to solve the paradoxes of history or of truth. We are invited to hold them gently, to witness one another’s stories, and to allow the healing threads to emerge.

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I would love to hear from you:

• How do you hold the history of your own lineage — whether colonizer or colonized?
• What helps you discern between a half-truth, a white lie, and a silence that protects?
• How do you tend the Field for those who come after you?