What Endures in Times of Collapse
“Faith is what we have when we believe in ourselves and what it is we are about, the tangibility of our horizon story (not the probability)” –Norma Kaweloka Wong
In just thirteen slim chapters, Roshi Norma Wong’s When No Thing Works blends spirituality, Zen practice, Hawaiian Indigenous wisdom, collective resilience, and political strategy to address how we can adapt purposefully in a world of ongoing crises. An 86th generation Rinzai Zen Master and Abbot of Anko-in, Roshi Wong serves practice communities in Hawaii, the continental United States, and Toronto, Canada. She has also served as a state legislator and policy advisor to Governor of Hawaii, John Waihee. Released the week of the November 2024 presidential elections in the United States, Wong’s writing is a timely and vital offering to “look at the possibility beyond the fraughtness of the current moment.”
If you are looking for a prescribed, straightforward “toolkit” for how to meet the world in these times, this is not the book for you. As a longtime student and practitioner of Zen myself, I was especially struck by the non-linear structure of Wong’s writing that did not rush to give an answer to the world’s predicaments. Each chapter feels like an entryway into a teaching that unfolds gradually, resonating uniquely with the human experience. Much like Zen koans, Wong’s words ask to be approached with a mind open to uncertainty, or what is often referred to in Zen as not knowing—inviting her lyricism and storytelling to reveal insights that transcend the conceptual intellect. Her poetic and lyrical style serves not only as an invitation, but perhaps as an invocation to access a different mode of imagination and collective visioning—one that is less concerned with identifying problems and more attuned to what is emerging along with what has been rooted or seeded by those who came before us.
As a Zen practitioner, social justice educator, activist, and a human deeply intentional about her actions for the generations to come, one of the most profound teachings I have received from Roshi Norma Wong’s work is her transmission of leaping. Wong writes, “No leap occurs without leaving the safety of what you know and leaning into a constantly changing unknown.” Her teaching on leaping disrupts our linear notions of time and space, grounding us in the Zen principle of not knowing. In my work as a facilitator, coach, teacher, and chaplain rather than tend to the work of healing from a place of “fixing,” I ground in not knowing to cultivate capacity to be in deep discomfort and ambiguity. Rather than rushing toward answers, I co-create practices and containers that help people sit with uncertainty and encourage structured reflection when things feel unclear or unresolved. This orientation honors not knowing as fertile ground for transformation. It invites us to release the need for certainty, to drop into presence, and to dwell in the rich, generative space of the unknown.
Not knowing—the first tenet of the Zen Peacemakers’ practices—asks us to relinquish our assumptions and the narratives we carry about how the world should be. As humans, we are conditioned to operate through fixed frameworks: what we believe is happening, what we think should happen, and how to fix things so they align with that imagined future. As a strategist and organizer, Wong understands this pattern intimately. Yet, as a spiritual teacher grounded in Indigenous wisdom, she also reminds us of our capacity to live in pure awareness—another expression of not knowing. In this state, there is no clinging to ideas—only seeing. Seeing the true nature of reality as it is: its hardships, its beauty, and its boundless potential, including the possibility of collective evolution. She argues “leaping is transformative evolution in which there is evolving transformation.”
Leaping, then, is more than stepping into not knowing—it is the embodied practice of living it. It is the act of becoming transformation in motion. For Wong, leaping is not optional in this era she names as “when no thing works.” It is essential. Leaping sharpens our awareness of our habits, nurtures practices rooted in resilience, and invites us into collective imaginings and strategies—not bound by what we think solutions should be, nor tethered to the expectation that we will live to see their outcomes. Her teaching reminds us that what we do—our actions grounded in intention—are all we truly possess. And ultimately, they are what endures “when no thing works.”
[1] adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, “When No Thing Works with Norma Wong,” How to Survive the End of the World, podcast episode, November 12, 2024, 1:24:16, https://endoftheworldshow.org/episodes/when-no-thing-works-with-norma-wong.
[2] Norma Wong, When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse (North Atlantic Books, 2024), [p51].
[2] Son, Monika L. “Revealing Healing, Wholeness, and Power: Sitting Zazen.” In Contemplative Practices and Acts of Resistance in Higher Education, pp. 81-90. Routledge, 2024.
[4] For more details, please see The Three Tenents found at zenpeacemakers.org. Not knowing is the first tenet of the Three Tenets Practice, founded by Roshi Bernie Glassman in1994 as an embodied practice to meet suffering. The other two tenets are: Bearing Witness and Compassionate Action. Not knowing or letting go of our fixed ideas of ourselves or how we see the world are the foundation for being able to presence and open to the other two tenets. We can better bear witness if we have no expectation or assumption of what we are present to. Further, we can act from a place that is about lifting up compassionate action to the suffering we meet.
[5] Norma Wong, When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse (North Atlantic Books, 2024), [p51].
