Listening for Your S-O-N-G in Tea: A Generative Listening Gathering

Event Description:

What happens when a poet, a professor, and an artist walk into a tea bar? They slow down, steep together, and something unexpected begins.

This gathering is a practice in generative listening, held in community, with tea as both medium and teacher. Generative listening asks us to listen in ways that change what becomes possible—in ourselves, in relationship, and in the world we are co-creating.

We’ll explore tea as a web of relationships—between people and place, past and present, ecology and economy.

This experience is led by three facilitators—a poet, a professor, and an artist—all longtime tea practitioners, each bringing her own lens, history, and relationship to tea. From cultural lineage to embodied ritual to ecological and social awareness, their practices invite multiple ways of listening, held together in conversation.

In a time of crisis—political, climatic, racial, personal—we invite you into a practice of attending to one another without distraction, haste, or erasure. Tea—slow to steep, patient in a hurried world—is our vehicle to listen to our intuition, inheritance, responsibility, and possibility.

On January 31, 2026, we gather at The Pauline Tea-Bar Apothecary for a two-hour, guided experience exploring listening across four dimensions—Self, Others, Nature, and the Greater Whole—your S-O-N-G.

This gathering is for those who sense that how we listen now matters. Tea carries history, labor, ecology, ceremony, and resistance. It slows the body, sharpens attention, and invites us to sit with what is here—personally, socially, and politically.

What We’ll Practice Together

We will move through a gentle but intentional arc of generative listening:

Listening Inward (Self)

How tea helps us listen to intuition, body knowledge, ancestry, and inner voice.

Listening Across (Others)

How tea practices open space for relational listening—across difference, memory, culture, and borders.

Listening to Nature

How tea connects us to land, seasonality, ecology, and non-human kin.

Listening Beyond (The Greater Whole)

How coming together—here and now—reshapes what we carry forward into the world.

Throughout the afternoon, you’ll engage in guided reflection, journaling, small-group conversation, and shared silence, all held within a container of respect, curiosity, and mutual care.

Facilitator Bios

Olivia Dorsey Peacock

Olivia Dorsey Peacock is a family historian, poet, and tea maven whose work centers authentic, creative engagements with Black history, memory, and archives. She has received fellowships and support from The Watering Hole, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Arts & Science Council, and has served as Charlotte Lit’s 2025 GoodLit Poetry Fellow and a 2025 Goodyear Arts Artist-in-Residence. Her writing appears in Lucky Jefferson, The Petigru Review, poetry.onl, and Shot Glass Journal. Her forthcoming chapbook, but first water, navigating perfection, identity, and inheritance, will be published in Spring 2026.

Debarati Dutta

Debarati Dutta is a writing educator, oral historian, and multisensory storyteller. A curious home cook, intrepid foodie, and novice tea student, she builds community through story-sharing, food, and tea. To Debarati, tea embodies the Hawaiian principle of mālama—listening and attending to oneself, others, land, and planet. Tea is both rest and resistance, a way to thin the noise of the attention economy and practice care, seasonality, and humility. Tea, for her, is a life lesson in a cup. 2026 will be a year of steeping, stillness, and quiet making for Debarati, a year for sowing, drinking new teas, creating foodscapes to gather at, and (perhaps) documenting the life of tea in her own family and in West Bengal.

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger is an artist, writer, and systems-minded tea crafter who works at the intersection of garden, ritual, and conversation. Rooted in seasonal rhythms and a lifelong love of plants, ink, and quiet inquiry, her work invites others to slow down, notice, and gather with intention. Tea becomes both hospitality and practice—a way of making space for listening, warmth, and shared presence. She believes good tea builds community the way good gardens do: patiently, generously, and with room for everyone to arrive as they are, human or otherwise.

About Listening Labs:

Our modern world is a forest of noise. People are overwhelmed, divided, disconnected, and isolated. US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy emphasizes that deeper conversations are vital to our individual and collective thriving. At Listening Labs, we believe that generous listening is at the heart of meaningful conversation. We teach you to be wholly present in the act of listening — to receive others with care. We teach you to listen to connect, rather than judge. We teach listening that’s powered by curiosity and demands vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of biases and assumptions and take in ambiguity. We teach you how to listen to understand the humanity behind others’ words, how to patiently summon your highest attention and most possibilitarian insights and questions.

At Listening Labs, we believe that generous listening is generative. We teach you how to listen in a way that moves from deep connection to powerful creation. When we’re listening in a generative way, we feel the electricity. Something profound is created in the space between us. In pulling for one another’s highest possibility, we find words for the ineffable. A vibrant vision emerges where before there was only a blank canvas.

It’s never been more important to focus on what we can create together. Human beings are deeply interconnected social animals. The human capacity for connection and collaboration has allowed us to survive, evolve, and find innovative solutions to global problems.

Whether in your work or personal life, Listening Labs teaches you how to listen in a way that creates unforeseen possibilities. We want to create a listening revolution in our communities and the next generation.

Info: Introductions to Listening Labs, Pauline’s Tea Bar, and the facilitators

Info: Stretch, refill tea, engage with the art and space

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Pauline Tea-Bar Apothecary, 2326 Arty Avenue, Charlotte, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

Get App