Beyond East and West: A Return to Ourselves

Lately, I’ve been sharing reflections on colonization, the Western worldview, and the suppressed wisdom of peoples and places often left out of the dominant narratives. These sharings have opened up conversations—some joyful, some uncomfortable—and I welcome all of it. But today I want to say something clearly:

This is not about making the East “better” or the West “worse.”

This is not about trading one form of superiority for another.

This is not about othering at all.

It’s about remembering.

It’s about returning.

It’s about wholeness.

I was born in Aotearoa—New Zealand—on land that still pulses with the sacred breath of the Māori, where songlines run beneath the earth and mountains hold memory. I carry British and Scottish blood, cultures with deep mythologies and long shadows. I carry Mohawk lineage, which runs through the story of Turtle Island, through the wound of residential schools, and through the beauty of ceremonies that still remember how to speak to the land.

I am a woman made of contradictions.

Of honour and dishonour.

Of colonizer and colonized.

Of the settler and the silenced.

Living in Bali now, immersed in rhythms and rituals that were never mine, I listen. I witness. I sit at the altar of what is ancient, not as a collector of spiritual trinkets, but as someone who knows that wisdom has never belonged to one hemisphere, one language, one people. Wisdom has always been shared, not hoarded. It was only the systems of conquest that taught us otherwise.

And so when I speak about the losses wrought by colonization or lift up wisdom traditions from Africa, Asia, or Indigenous cultures, I do so not to pit “them” against “us,” but to return us to I&I, to dissolve the illusion that we were ever separate in the first place.

We were never just East.

We were never just West.

We were never just men.

We were never just women.

We were never just one story.

Each of us is more than the checkboxes we are given.

Each of us holds multitudes—grief and grace, trauma and triumph.

I’m committed to the return.

The return to I&I.

The return to wholeness, to dignity, to knowing we belong to one another and to this Earth.

But part of that return requires truth-telling.

It requires listening to the pain of those whose stories were buried.

It requires letting each person be seen, not just for the parts that are convenient or comfortable, but in the full breadth of their humanity.

So no, this is not about diminishing anyone.

It’s about lifting us all.

It’s about the remembering we are already one, and we simply forgot.

And to that remembering, I give my voice, my creation, and my life.