Your S.O.N.G in the Trees: A Walden Walk with Jen McGivney & Listening Labs

Take a mindful walk through Evergreen Nature Preserve and rediscover what it means to listen deeply. Your S.O.N.G. in the Trees: A Walden Walk invites you to slow down and reconnect with four dimensions of listening—Self, Others, Nature, and Greater power.

Inspired by Jen McGivney’s Finding Your Walden, this guided experience from Listening Labs blends reflection, journaling, and quiet community presence. Each participant receives a free copy of Finding Your Walden and a handmade Listener’s Field Guide zine to record observations, sketches, and fragments of insight discovered along the way.

Expect gentle prompts, pauses for stillness, and moments of shared reflection. You’ll leave refreshed, grounded, and humming your own “song” from the woods—an intention or awareness to bring back into daily life.

Finding Your Walden combines classic lit with happiness studies, exploring how experts support Henry David Thoreau’s ideas as inspiration for today’s Great Reassessment. It shares stories of people who embrace Thoreau’s pare-down-to-trade-up philosophy today. They inspire us to apply creativity and simplicity to the experiment of life.

Whether you love Walden or haven’t read it, you can join Thoreau on a path to discover an intentional life during a volatile time—you just need to make a stop at a cabin on the way.

Jen Tota McGivney is a writer in Charlotte. She’s the back-page columnist for Charlotte Magazine, in addition to writing for magazines including Success Magazine, Simplify, Southern Living, and Our State. She has a master’s degree in English from Winthrop University and a soft spot for the transcendentalists.

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.

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