“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.”—Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Rōshi, coauthor of Radical Dharma

“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.”—adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy

“Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong explores the essence of a twenty-first-century Indigenous worldview in When No Thing Works. 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 counsel 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.”—Judith LeBlanc, citizen of the Caddo Nation, ekah (grandmother), and executive director of the Native Organizers Alliance