When No Thing Works
Talking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective acceleration: the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures. Grounded in Zen Buddhism, interconnection, and decades of community activism, When No Thing Works explores questions like:
As we stand at a threshold of collective change, what leaps must we make?
How can we push through discord and polarization and meet these critical changepoints collectively?
What practices, strategies, and spiritualities can align to vision a sustainable future for our communities and descendants?
How can we step out of urgency to tend to our crises with wisdom, intention, and care?
With wise and witty prose that wanders and turns, guides and reveals, Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian leader Roshi Norma Wong’s meditation holds our collective moment with gravity and tender care. She asks us to not only imagine, but to live into, a story beyond crisis and collapse—one that expands to meet our dreams of what (we hope) comes next while facing with clarity and grace our here and now in the world we share today.
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Reviews
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Rōshi Co-author, _Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation":
“This slender volume is a bountiful exhortation of the human spirit’s potential to unwind intractable challenges of our “collective acceleration,” and a sharp knife that slices through wishful, lazy, or destructive machinations to get there. Wong Rōshi’s unique confluence of locations, lineages, and experience are honed into a wisdom lens we can peer through to couple our Why and our Way. Like all great teachers, she imparts story and strategy with equal measures of humility, reminding us that how we be matters to how we become.
Lyrical, sure, and threaded with the deft insight and forgiving humor of a guide who knows how flawed we can be, Wong Rōshi offers not so much a map, but a strategic pointing to the constellation of choices and practices we can and must navigate to enter a slipstream into an ever-possible future, together. This work is a triumph, and you can feel the thunderous dance of ancestors’ — past and future — approval.”
adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds:
“Norma Wong has been a compelling teacher in the realm of transformation for years - when I met her she was somehow one with the floor as several grownups tried with zero success to lift her up. I wanted to learn everything about that grounding. In this tight, engaging work, Norma is walking us through current events and possibilities, pointing out the actual currents, the questions, the timeplaces and emergent worldviews that most matter. This is deep, no nonsense grounding, taught lightly, with invitation and humor and curiosity. Profound and embodied in each line…I know I will return to this text over and over. I join Norma on the path towards “interdependent thriving”, towards a visionary spacetime that grows from the seeds of our practice in the here and now.”
Judith LeBlanc, a citizen of the Caddo Nation, an Ekah (Grandmother) and Executive Director, Native Organizers Alliance:
“Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong explores the essence of a 21st century Indigenous world view in When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Time of Collapse. She relies on knowing that all things, past and future are in relationship. What we imagine and how we walk in the present determines the future. As Norma signals, our walk must include leaps that take us into unknowns, but we will not be alone. Norma gives us wise council for this difficult moment on Mother Earth. One culture, one belief system, one community alone is unable to fulfill our ancestors’ collective hopes for all of our descendants. As Norma’s ancestors said, “ O ka ehu kakahiaka…the red dawn of our people became the red dawn of many peoples.” Hawwih (thank you in Caddo), Norma, your family and your people!”
Tessa Hicks Peterson of Pitzer College:
“This is no ordinary book – it is more of a koan, a dreamspace poem, a love letter to future descendants. It lives at the intersections of reflective political analysis about the pivotal, cleaving moment we are currently experiencing and future stories of “the world as we would have it be.“ With an expansive understanding of emergent worldview, strategy and practice, the author weaves a web of mutuality that inspires a more interconnected version of the future and ourselves.”
About Norma
Norma Ryūkō Kawelokū Wong Roshi, familiarly known as Norma Wong or Wong Roshi, is an emerging kupuna (elder) living in the land of her birth, Hawai‘i.
When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse is sponsored and published by North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit based in the unceded Ohlone land Huichin (Berkeley, CA) that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives; nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing; and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.
North Atlantic Books’s publications are distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.