The Ancestors We Are Becoming: A Zen Teacher’s Call to Face Collapse With Aloha

In an era defined by polycrisis, a singular teaching emerges from the intersection of Zen practice and Indigenous Hawaiian wisdom. Norma Ryuko Kaweloku Wong Roshi, abbot of Anko-in temple, offers a profound reframing of our generational responsibility: we are not merely inheritors of the past, but ancestors-in-training for a future we will never see.

Wong’s recent podcast, The Horizon Story, deliberately resurrects the oral tradition as a vessel for wisdom transmission. “There’s something about it that mimics the oral tradition,” she explains, “the notion that you would be with people, and you would tell stories, and you would converse, and that that would be the way in which knowledge and wisdom would be translated across generations.” This is not nostalgia but a strategic reclaiming of agency and interdependence in a time of collapse.

The teaching cuts through spiritual consumerism. For Wong, who spent thirty years in electoral politics before taking up the abbacy, the spiritual path is inseparable from collective responsibility. Her lineage—Native Hawaiian and Hakka Chinese—grounds a practice that refuses the luxury of disengagement. The question she poses to practitioners is not “how do I escape,” but rather “who are we becoming, together?”

This is the job of our generation: to become worthy ancestors, not through accumulation, but through the courageous, embodied work of tending to what endures.