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When No Thing Works Study Group
Study Group:
A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse
A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse
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, in "When No Thing Works" Norma Wong 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?
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.
Why This Group? - Bram Moreinis, Resilient Greenfield
Why This Group? - Bram Moreinis, Resilient Greenfield
Whether you've done movement work, community organizing, zen meditation, or intentional communal living, When No Thing Works (https://bit.ly/when-no-thing-works will activate and integrate experiences to offer an actionable context for responding to the climate crisis in your community.
We started Resilient Greenfield to make our local community more able to withstand what we saw coming from the Climate Crisis and other factors in the collapse of what some call "modernity". That collapse has already begun, of course; it is just not evenly distributed. When No Thing Works offers indigenous and Zen perspectives for orienting meaningful effort now and by future generations, informing our practices and organizing towards thriving seven generations hence.
The Zen Downeast community has an EcoSattvas group (see mission below) studying this book. On my first pass with the audiobook I had to replay parts when my attention wandered - it requires deep engagement. After a second pass there is much left to mine, with others in communities near mine to support each other.
I want to support a reading/discussion/practice group around this book, extended to participants throughout the Connecticut River Valley in MA. Meeting in person is best to build shared presence, but hybrid meetings support participation by those with much to contribute from other communities along the river.
I envision a bi-weekly round-robin reading with frequent questions and explorative discussion the first time through this book with a larger group, and then another round by a smaller circle of those who want to put it into practice. But let's see what happens.
Our EcoSattvas DownEast are committed to not turning away, nor sitting on our cushions while expecting others to solve the problem. We recognize that we have a brief window of opportunity to take action, to preserve humanity from imminent disaster, and to assist the survival of the many diverse and beautiful forms of life on Earth.
Future generations, and the other species that share the biosphere with us, have no voice to ask for our compassion, wisdom and leadership. We commit to listen to their silence, be their voice, too, and to act on their behalf.
As a community, we commit to actualizing the Bodhisattva vow and to helping ourselves and others to fully awaken to the truth of an endangered planet. We vow to live as EcoSattvas, and practice compassionate care of the earth.
After decades of discord, Canada and First Nations are working together to build a network of marine protected areas stretching from Vancouver Island to Alaska. ...
Over the past two decades, British Columbia has made strides in recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous-colonial relationships that had long been antagonistic have become more cooperative.
Bram note: see Clearcut movie starring Graham Greene:
Resources and Ideas for Local Application
Resources and Ideas for Local Application
IDEA: We could create a website for folk wisdom, using skills and resources shared on the Emergency Preparedness and Mutual Aid Signal Chat. The Driftless Folk School (https://www.driftlessfolkschool.org) website gave me the idea: "Located in the beautiful rolling hills and valleys of the Driftless bioregion in SW Wisconsin, we offer classes in land stewardship, natural building & woodworking, arts and crafts, organic agriculture, herbalism, wilderness skills, and more. Our aim is to make the skills and knowledge necessary for a sustainable life more widely available to the people of our bioregion and beyond." - Bram
Links and Resources for Background Info
Links and Resources for Background Info
Blind Spots
Blind Spots
I prefer this as a podcast. Nate challenges a lot of sloppy ideas some of us hold about how we get out of this mess. Nothing here contradicts what Norma Wong writes about, though - and he ends with the Hawaiian Aloha as the relationship with life and Earth to be sought.
Community Sufficiency with Kara Huntermoon
Community Sufficiency with Kara Huntermoon
Here it is as a web page with an audio player. I prefer this as a podcast. Permaculturist and educator, Kara Huntermoon, says the hobbies we pick up now can be skills we pass on to our children. She talks about how relationality, intergenerational solidarity, and hard work support the practice of community sufficiency. This all seems directly in line with Norma Wong's characterizations of what her community is doing in Hawaii.
Agency & Impact
Agency & Impact
I prefer this as a podcast. Max Wilbert is a long-time activist who spent the past few years defending Thacker Pass, and recently joined CELDF to as part of their new strategy to build out community resilience. It supports the movement organizing side of When No Thing Works.
Living in a time of Dying
Living in a time of Dying
Cries of Grief, Rage, Love and Hope
Cries of Grief, Rage, Love and Hope
MEGHAN ELIZABETH TALK
Meghan is part of our circle, and her book, updated and with an audiobook read by the author, was republished in 2022. It is available from Apple Books (Audio & eReader) as well as Audible/Kindle (Amazon) and others. The chapters alternate between personal anecdotes and reflections by Meghan, and Taoist teachings by her co-author, William Horden.
The opportunity to hear an author read her own work, and to have her in our group, is precious. Reading/listing is the experience of joining her as she recalls her journey; I found it touching, inspiring and integrating, Strongly recommended!
I strongly recommendbooks which also include authors narrating their journey through the stages of grief at the end of Modernity which I also recommend: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine and read by him, and Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Marchado (indigenous scholar), audiobook read by Dougald Hine. - Bram
CHRIS REED AND NINA-MARIE LISTER, 4/24
..The field of ecology has moved away from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty and order, in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience and flexibility.
LUKE KEMP AND RACHEL DONALD, PLANET CRITICAL
In this astounding conversation, Luke takes us from the Ancient times to the modern day, revealing the root causes of collapse and paralleling them what we’re living through today. He explains the egalitarian nature of our species, and shines new light on what a future could look like free from today’s global Goliath. He reminds us all that we tend to view collapse through the eyes of the 1%, those who have the most to lose, and gives startling accounts of how populations bounced back after their domineering rulers fell.
From Rebecca Solnit's Blog, Meditations in an Emergency:
...[W]e are entering the age of climate chaos, or rather have entered it, an age of more disasters and more dangerous/destructive ones. I bring it up now because we are in another kind of disaster. I see both the hell of authoritarianism trying to strip us of so much that matters, and I see the paradise of an engaged civil society responding to defend each other, defend values and principles, nature, science and truth. The theories of human nature underlying each position are diametrically opposed.
...[D]isaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles of compassion for all beings, of non-attachment, of the illusion of one’s sense of separateness, of being fully present, of awareness of ephemerality, and of fearlessness or at least aplomb in the face of uncertainty. ...For most, this other state of existence during disaster is fleeting; most people go back to some version of the life they were living before, the assumptions they operated on before. A minority change their lives profoundly. I think of a disaster as shaking people awake to who they can be and what they value most.
That joy comes from finding out who we really are and what we really value. It comes from the fact that what we want most deeply is meaning and connection, even after lifetimes of being told that we just want to be pretty, and rich, and safe, and amused. That joy comes from finding our deepest selves and finding each other in a deep way. So it shakes us awake but then we fall back asleep, fall into this other version of ourselves. The question I was left with is how do we stay awake?
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