In 2026, OmVed Gardens will turn its focus to Listening, not as a passive act, but as a living, sensory, and communal practice of attention, connection, responsibility and care. If 2025 was about growing resilience, then 2026 asks how we become resilient: by listening deeply: to ourselves, to one another, and to the more-than-human world around us.
Listening is the beginning of care. It is how we attune to what is needed, how we notice what is changing, how we can begin to respond with empathy and imagination.
Inspired by our name, OmVed, Om as universal vibration, Ved as living knowledge, we explore listening as a pathway for knowing and caring that engages the whole body. We propose listening not only with our ears, but through all our senses. Smelling, tasting, touching, seeing and moving can also be ways of listening.
To listen is to make space for others, human and more-than-human, it is an act of humility and repair, an invitation to slow down and to sense the world anew. The head, heart, and gut must also be heard, and so is the soil underfoot, the plants reaching toward light, the birds singing, the compost breaking, the air shifting.
As a Community Interest Company, OmVed Gardens commits in 2026 to deepening its role as a place of attunement and care, where listening becomes action, and care becomes an essential way to building community.
We ask:
How can we tune in more deeply to the voices and needs around us?
How can listening make us more prepared for shocks, climatic, ecological, emotional?
What does it mean to listen as a community, to its stories, struggles, and future visions?
How might listening itself be a form of care for land, for life, for one another?
In a world where speed and extraction often dominate, to listen and to care are acts of quiet rebellion. They require attention, time, maintenance, humility, and hope.
Through food, art, ecology, and collective practice, OmVed Gardens becomes a unique space for Listening as Care: a living classroom where soil, plants, pollinators, and people attune to each other to build resilience, and every gesture of tending: weeding, watering, composting, cooking, gathering, becomes a radical act of repair.
