School for Public Life – Session 3
Listening as Gardening, Gardening as Listening
Date: 18th of August
When: 16.30-18.00
Where: Permahaven, CBS, 55°40’56.2″N 12°31’26.0″E
Who: Bureau for Listening and Permahaven
Practicalities: Bring a filled water bottle for hydration
Everyone is welcome, all sessions will be held outside. Due to limited space and better planning we ask you to sign up through this link.
OBS: when the School for Public Life session ends at 18:00 you are very welcome to stay, hang eat dinner, connect – at 19:00-21:00 Permahaven, Bureau for Listening and Critical Mass is co-hosting and organizing a salon engaging ‘visiting more-than-human beings’. You are very welcome to join, as these two event will support and deepen each other – please also, if possible, register for this by writing bureauforlistening@gmail.com. More info and a link will come.
Listening as Gardening, Gardening as Listening
Workshop Introduction
What if to garden is to listen? Not only to the sounds and songs of a garden’s inhabitants, but to the rhythms and relations beneath, between, and beyond; to attend to, nurture and await processes unfold, connections entangle with each other, and relationships intertwine? How may listening and gardening learn from and support each other as practices in the attempts of regenerating relationships, interdependencies, and value the not-yet and unknown?
In the context of permaculture, gardening is not an act of imposition, but of co-creation. It requires a mode of attention that is patient, porous, and attuned; for a gardener in this context, control is unlearned and a non-mastery relationship is cultivated with the place. This calls for a kind of third listening, one that invites mutual recognition between beings, one that nurtures interdependence and accountability.
To listen as a gardener is to tune into more-than-human temporalities: the slow unfolding of soil life, the gestures of fungi, the silence before rain. It is to hold space for the unspeakable and ungraspable, for not-knowing; for decay, transformation, absence; for emergence, change and healing. Gardening as listening means asking: What is this place trying to become? What does the land want, not just what do we need from it? It is an ethical and ecological practice; grounded, situated, and always in relation.
This workshop explores how tending a garden and cultivating a listening practice are not separate acts, but parallel gestures of care. Both require stillness, response-ability, and a willingness to be changed by the encounter.
Notes on the programme:
The School for Public life will evolve around an expanded welcome, introduction to the format of the school, and a presentation of the perma-garden as critical practice, followed by a workshop and listening session exploring theme of: Listening as Gardening, Gardening as Listening – a practice of third listening. The session will end with time for reflection, collective sharing and discussion.
Organizers:
Sebastian Olsson is a Research Assistant at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School, working in both EU and nationally funded sustainability projects. Sebastian is a former member of the student organisation CBS Climate Club. Here, his journey as a volunteer of Permahaven’s community started with the goal of bridging the concept to students. After obtaining his master’s degree, Sebastian has continued as an active volunteer, as he enjoys spending afternoons and weekends gardening or spending time with other volunteers in Permahaven.
Lukas Quist Lund is a philosopher, art historian, and organizer working with interdisciplinary practices from a center of philosophical and artistic ‘wondering’. He is aiming for different research-actions-methodologies as well as extra-institutional initiatives and projects, including the TRAVERS and SHOUT projects, The Resting Labs, Center for Not-Knowing. Lukas is a founding member of Bureau for Listening.
The Big Welcome (Permagarden Adaptation)
We are so honored to welcome you all here.
Take a moment right now to allow yourself to fully arrive.
Like seeds settling into soil, allow the dust to settle in your mind. Bring your attention to your body, your breath, this present season, this living ground. You have arrived.
Welcome.
We welcome your excitement and your trepidation. Your clear inquiries and your big question marks. We welcome your wide eyes and open hearts alongside your side eyes and skepticism. We welcome your listening as well as your voicing body — the way roots and shoots both belong to the plant.
You are welcome here.
Your culture is welcome. Your ethnic origin is welcome.
Your race, your skin, accent, food preferences, and all of the complexities that make up your cultural identity are welcome here. The histories, herstories, and experiences of your ancestors are honored and welcomed — compost that continues to nourish the present.
We welcome you with all of the connections you bring in with you — the children in your lives, your partners, siblings, parents, the animals in your lives, and other loved ones in your communities. All these relations are threads in the ecology of our gathering.
You are welcome here.
We welcome your spiritual practice, your religious affiliation, the path you walk. However you hold that aspect of your life is welcomed — as waters that move differently yet feed the same soil.
Your love is welcome here. How you love, who you love, and your understanding of what love is are all welcome.
We welcome you in all of the ways your sexuality has evolved and is evolving.
We welcome you in all of the ways your gender has evolved and is evolving.
We welcome you in your ignorance. We welcome you in your privilege. We welcome you in your grief. We welcome you in your guilt and shame — like weather patterns that mark the landscape, they are part of the cycle of renewal.
You are welcome here.
We welcome the parts of yourself that you’re still figuring out.
We welcome you in the roles as learners, activists, teachers, healers, feelers, intuitives, parents, caretakers, students, artists, witches, change agents, magicians, educators, and warriors.
We welcome you at whatever level of mental and physical wellness you are currently functioning. We welcome your introversion and your extroversion. We welcome all of the experiences that led you to this moment. Thank you for surviving, for continuing to grow through seasons of drought and flood.
We welcome your wounds and scars, the marks that also tell of resilience, like bark weathered by years.
We welcome you at whatever level at which you are currently decolonizing. We welcome you wherever you are in divesting from systemic patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and all other intersecting forms of oppression. We welcome you as you unlearn internalized anti-blackness and cultural norms that do not serve the health of our interconnected communities.
You are welcome here.
We give thanks for each of your sacred connections to the land on which you were conceived, the lands that hosted your births, and the lands of your ancestors — the fertile grounds that continue to hold us.
You are welcome here, and we give thanks.
We thank you for being here, for offering your time, attention, and affections. We give thanks for what you bring in the way you bring it. We give thanks for both the said and the unsaid, to the knowledge shared, and the caring of the unknowing.
Thank you.
Settle in. Take root.
Welcome.
Notes on Listening as Gardening and Gardening as Listening:
Listening as Gardening / Gardening as Listening
What if to garden is already to listen? Not only to the audible songs of wind, insects, or water, but also to the inaudible — to the slow movements beneath soil, the hesitant gestures of roots, the murmurs of absence and decay. What if listening, like gardening, is less about taking in what is given than about entering into relation with what is not yet fully formed, what resists capture, what arrives only in fragments?
In permaculture, gardening is not an act of mastery but of co-creation. It demands a different posture of attention: porous, patient, and responsive. A gardener, here, must learn to let go of control, to recognize that growth cannot be commanded but only accompanied. Might listening, too, ask for such unlearning? A listening that suspends the need to grasp meaning immediately, that instead lingers with the unfinished, the not-yet, the more-than-human?
Third listening offers one possible orientation: a listening that is not merely reception, nor agreement, nor the work of one self toward another, but a dwelling-with. It is listening as recognition across difference, listening as accountability, listening that holds space for the unheard, even the disappeared. Could we imagine gardening as a practice of such listening — where each act of tending is an invitation to reciprocity, to holding open a space for mutual becoming?
To listen as a gardener is to enter unfamiliar temporalities: the slow rhythm of mycelial threads, the seasonal patience of fruiting trees, the spectral temporality of compost where yesterday’s abundance becomes tomorrow’s soil. What happens when we let these times unsettle our own? Can listening stretch us into other cadences of attention, into non-linear rhythms where waiting is as vital as doing?
To garden as a listener is to hear in multiple registers: the call of the bird overhead, but also the silence of what has vanished; the resilience of weeds breaking through pavement, but also the fragility of ecosystems under strain. It is to ask: What is this place trying to become? What does the land want of us, not only what do we want of it?
Both gardening and listening are gestures of care, yet both are also confrontations with vulnerability. Soil erodes, relationships fracture, listening falters. Can we hold these failures as part of the practice, as compost for new possibilities? Can we accept that listening — like gardening — will always exceed us, that it asks us to be changed in ways we cannot predict?
Perhaps then the question is not how to listen well or how to garden well, but how to remain within the unfolding: how to cultivate patience with the unknown, how to stay with the interdependence of beings, how to honor the rhythms of more-than-human worlds.