What Would Healing Look Like? (Part 2) with Belvie Rooks, Liz Miller, Matt Davis, & Fran Grace

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener 

Today I’m graced to have Belvie Rooks back again. When I spoke with Belvie, I thought there are such ripple effects of your work and the stories you heard last time, particularly a story about being in Ghana and visiting the slave dungeon. The question of What Would Healing Look Like? and how that brought you towards this vision of Growing a Global Heart. I’ve invited several young people, Liz Miller and Matt Davis, who Belvie and Dedan worked with to join us. They are carrying forward parts of their work. Also here is Fran Grace, who is an author and a teacher and has been a publisher of Belvie and Dedan’s book of poetry. We’ll explore where did those seeds take root in each other’s lives?

In the previous episode, we talked about Belvie meeting Dr. King early on, and how powerful it was, as a young person, to have someone like him, see and trust her and the other young people. He said he “could trust us to love a better world into existence.”  We talked about how special it was to be in his presence and then have a group of adults holding space for young people with that spirit. Maybe I’ll start with Liz and Matt. Could you share the story of how did you meet Belvie and Dedan and how that fed into the work that you’re doing now in the world?

Liz Miller

It was so beautiful listening to the first part of this podcast because I didn’t remember Belvie telling the story about being in a bookstore and having a book fall on her head. The funniest part is, that’s sort of how I met Belvie, as a book fell on my head! I was in my 20s and I was going through a period of confusion. It was both an illness I was experiencing in my body and a deep sadness I had in my heart or in my soul. I was really lost. I was wandering through a bookstore and I sort of bumped into the shelf, and a book from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, about astronaut Edgar Mitchell fell on my head. It was like the strangest answer to a prayer I didn’t know I was making.

I was headed to take a job in New York City. I just couldn’t stop thinking about this book. And then weeks later, Edgar Mitchell actually came to the University of Minnesota where I was working and gave a lecture. It was just otherworldly for me. I had been really convinced I should do something very practical when you’re in your 20s. I thought “Okay, this is where I take life seriously,” but instead, I left my job in New York, packed my bags and showed up on Edgar Mitchell’s doorstep and asked to work for him.

Some weeks after that, I had a chance to meet the board and Belvie. I didn’t even know how to talk to her when I first saw her because she was so powerful in the presence that she brought into a room. But my fortune was that I was invited to attend a conference in Hawaii. And Belvie was there. I was there with the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I just wanted to be in any room Belvie was in. I felt like there was a familiarity to the way that she interacted with everyone that I longed for. I remember we got paired together in a sort of a moment of sharing. And Belvie started telling me stories about her grandmother.

I felt like it opened my heart in a way I couldn’t have asked for but needed. It became the beginning of a relationship that’s really been life changing for me. It was actually about a year later that I met Dedan.  Belvie, Matt and I were gathering to have dinner. Matt and I had met around the same time in graduate school. We invited them over to my house. I thought I was going to have to go and cook some dinner, but Dedan, came through the door, went into the kitchen, took everything out of the cabinets, and proceeded to make the most unbelievable soup I’ve ever had in my life. It was like watching magic happen.

As we sat down, he faced me for the first time and he asked me the first question he ever asked me. The question was, “what are your thoughts about synchronicity?” I didn’t know what to do with that. But it was so amazing to be asked a question that wasn’t about, “What are you studying? Or what do you do? Or where do you come from?” It almost felt like he had asked me how much trust do you have in your own self and in your own soul? How deeply are you willing to listen?

In our relationship with Belvie and Dedan, they gave both of us permission to live a life that’s rooted in the heart and the soul. We bring that same permission to young people that we work with now. A really deep path that revealed itself and brought us together with them. Every day now, we live in the gratitude of their mentorship and their warmth and generosity. We are able to share Dedan’s poetry and Belvie’s stories with young people and inviting them into a community of the heart. It is a privilege that they have allowed us to walk into the world and do.

Beth Tener 

Thank you, Liz for sharing that. Matt, what would you like to add?

Matt Davis

There are many reasons why I think Elizabeth and I work really well together. One is she really likes exploring into the world and being in conversation, and embracing a lot of different kinds of conversations. I like to be more quiet and wander along on my own or read a book. When she went to this conference in Hawaii, and she came back. People tend to be excited about new experiences and want to share different stories. I was in my own quiet, just nodding. When she started to talk about her interactions with Belvie, that was the first moment where I really wanted to listen. I just could not help but listen to what she had to share about it. That has been a common theme throughout the length of the relationship we’ve had with Belvie.

I remember the first time we met Dijon. Similarly it’s very magical in so many different ways. I remember that night ending in us sitting around in a circle and telling stories and pulling out pieces that had been written and reading them and sharing them. Sometimes we come in contact with people that you’ve never met before and you just feel completely at ease immediately as if they are family. That’s what it felt like to be in their presence in that moment. It has always been that way.

Dr. King’s last vision here was this notion of Beloved Community. In my own scholarship and academic inquiry I have wanted to explore, understand, research and read about that. For me, Belvie and Dedan were a living reality of what he was imagining. They both presented what I felt like I’d been searching for in a way that I think is really meaningful.

Beth Tener 

So that feeling of the longing that was met in the experience of how you are together. And could you share more about the organization that you have now that you work with?

Liz Miller

About seven years ago, we formalized a vision that was born in several places. It was born on this houseboat that Dedan and Belvie lived on for a long time down in Sausalito. Matt and I had been talking about taking the work we were doing in classrooms and putting some sort of umbrella over it so that it could include people and start to feel more like a cooperative space where people could come together to learn and create projects and hopeful visions.

Dedan had said to me that he felt like there was a role for poetry to play in helping young people feel really empowered to know that they are capable of creating a magnitude of change that they might not otherwise realize. And he had talked about how poetry is a really humanizing force in the world. That inside a poem, you drop into rhythms that you didn’t know you had, and you hear the rhythms that kind of shake free your mind and you see things you didn’t know you could see or didn’t know you could hear.

There was this way that he would talk about the willingness to feel. I experienced that so much with Belvie and Dedan. They turned toward things that are really difficult, in a way where you can experience the heartbreak and the suffering, and the hope and the love, sort of all in the same breath.

We started having a conversation with Dedan about what that could look like as an organization. We came up with this idea that Matt had had a long time ago to call the organization Pseads. It was really an ecological vision of enlivening the human spirit, enlivening the planet and using things like poetry and creativity and media creation and storytelling, to bring people together from a really young age, to feel part of a network and a community. The ideas is to invite what Matt sometimes calls a Beloved Learning Community. What he wanted Pseads to represent was a community you didn’t have to buy your way into in any way, that there was nothing you had to prove or do to belong to this community, and that every person was as important as every other person.

We started this organization formally seven years ago. We’ve worked with almost 29,000 students almost every single day for seven years from second or first grade all the way through college. We bring stories of the universe, the stories we received from Belvie, and Dedan’s poetry, and a deep appreciation of the Earth — all together in this interesting mix. It’s also about creating a different space for identity to be realized that, like Dedan said, has nothing to do with needing to prove anything and everything to do with showing up as you are.

It’s been really fun to work on this. When we first started doing it, I remember having this thought in my head, we will do this for a year or two. Now it’s like the kind of thing that wakes you up in the morning, and you can’t wait to do it. I think one of the really remarkable things about Pseads is that, because it has this kind of heart center that Dedan and Belvie really helped us bring forth, it feels sort of tireless. And when Dedan’s poems in particular are shared with young people, it’s as if they know him, which is so amazing to me. It’s as if his spirit somehow translates through the heartfulness of his words, and they want to write back to him. A lot of times, they’ll dedicate their poems for Dedan. So there’s this intergenerational wisdom that Belvie talks so beautifully about in real time, living its way out into the world.

Beth Tener

Thank you, Liz. That is so inspiring. Belvie, what has it been like for you to see Matt and Liz take this forward into the world?

Belvie Rooks

Thinking about this gathering, I found a quote by Thoreau. This is synchronicity.

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been. I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, I am prepared to expect wonders.”

I just found that and it felt so in alignment with the kind of enthusiasm, open ended loveliness, that Dedan would have when he would talk about the work and visioning and spending time with students and with Liz and Matt. It was also really heartbreaking in a lot of ways. Because when Dedan was preparing to leave, we knew he didn’t have much longer. He was in Zen hospice. One day I was in Zen hospice, and I kind of really acted like it wasn’t happening. I think he kept gently trying to get me to be with this.

I remember him taking my hand one day. He was just saying that he knew there would be a lot of tears and a lot of sadness, but tried to remember mostly the love and the journey. He went on to say, “we have planted a lot of seeds. And those seeds need nurturing now more than ever. Just know that I will be there.”

This idea of seeds keeps coming up. Seeds is a real, significant metaphor, had deep meaning for Dedan, as it relates to the journey.

Beth Tener 

One of the parts I really like in this story is the intergenerational connection. As we heard in the Dr. King story, and then to see how you’ve done that, with the younger generations. The restorative work of our time is to reestablish those kinship networks between generations in a way that our modern life doesn’t often invest in very well. This can tallow love to flow between generations. It’s embedded into the programs and the organizations with Pseads.

I’ll just have to note in the moment, one of the things Belvie does that’s so beautiful is whenever you talk to her, she talks lovingly about all the other people she loves in her life. I’ve always heard all these stories about Fran, Liz and Matt. So it’s just a treat to be here with you all.

I’m going to invite in Fran Grace to the conversation What was the synchronicity of your confluence meeting Belvie and Dedan and tell us a little bit about your life or work.

Fran Grace

We always circle around here. We may meet Belvie and Dedan like I did in a remote town in some breakfast joint called Queenie’s Diner. But as soon as you have that synchronistic moment of an encounter you’re forever changed. You then meet all these other wonderful people in this circle that she indeed has been not just a part of, but actively cultivating and nurturing like you would a seed that’s precious that you care about. So I’ve been a part of the circle now and so appreciate being here.

Synchronicity was a word that came up when Liz and Matt shared and Dedan asking you what are your thoughts on synchronicity? I really was laughing so hard. Because it just defies all logic. I mean, there is such incredible mystery to everything that we will never understand. And that was my whole experience.

I was in my 30s and it wasn’t a book that bonked me on the head. But it was the hand of some great wisdom that was far beyond my own. I was in a campervan set off from Southern California in my miserable little life. Blocked consciousness as was mentioned in the episode before where Belvie was talking about how we’re all just wrapped up in our own little struggles and our suffering. I had that very limited view of who I am and what I am and what my life is about. I was just focusing on all my problems and I took off, told my family, I got to be by myself. In other words, y’all are the problem.

It didn’t take me very many miles on the road to realize, I’m not even happy with myself. So there I am. I had the first synchronistic encounter up in Northern California, which was to an older mentor named sunlight. An older woman in her 60s who built her own little cabin in the woods, completely off the grid or solar panels and grew her own vegetables. Quite an organic person, really one with life emerging to become itself. She saw that life force in all things and she welcomed me and my struggling existence on her doors. We had a powerful evening into the night, where she helped me through a pattern of suffering, we’ll just say, I poured out everything that I had carted up there in my van, poured it all out.

The next day, she said, Well, let’s go to Queenie’s. All right. I would have gone anywhere, if she had said. So we went to Queenies, and we’re sitting there and in walk these amazing people. And she said, Well, it’s no accident, my friends, Belvie and Dedan are here. Would you like to meet them? They sat down at the table and they began to share about their experience.

I was sitting there in my blocked consciousness, my consciousness of suffering, where I couldn’t see beyond anything that was my own self and the problems I have created. And they were sharing a total breakthrough into some other consciousness that I had known in myself. Because we all know it, we all know deep inside, that we are part of someone web of life. And yet, I had not met a real example, of people who had struggled existentially, with something so deep and painful, and had broken through to that deeper consciousness of what we call love, to love life, and the tree to be a symbol of the connection that we all share deep in its roots.

I just sat there at the breakfast table. I have a few words right now that I’m sharing with you about what I understood, but it was so deeper than words. I just said, “Well, can you please come down to our campus? I just beg you please come, you need to share this breakthrough, this wisdom that you have.” Like Liz and Matt shared, meeting them changed the course of my life.

We talk about when we’re in the presence of a teacher, or even scripture itself – a living scripture of some deep teaching of this great truths of love, and forgiveness, and vision and hope, and trust. When you’re with people who have – yes, who struggle, Belvie is so humble. She says “I struggle, I’m just learning to love.” I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m way more learning than you are!” Like a transmission, you know, something living happens. We want to be in their presence. I said, “Please, please, please come.” And so they did.

Belvie Rooks 

Friend, people are always asking me, when are you going to write your memoir? I always say, probably never. What you’re describing is just mutual a mutual connection. We couldn’t believe that we had just wandered in and the synchronicity. We were headed to the beach, and we were not coming to Queenie’s. Then we get to the parking lot, just before we hit the beach, I decided I’m going to run and get a scone from Queenie’s. So he decides to come. I mean, just the magic in the mystery of the encounter. Elk is 250 people, that’s the population of the town that we’re in.

And the same with Matt and Liz, whatever is being described. I’m just always running around telling people about you, friend, because it just feels like such a gift. It’s like, what did I do, to just look up and these people who are just amazing and wonderful.

What I’m most excited about is how whatever we shared has been integrated. Because that what’s new. That I can learn from, we can learn from. Now I really saw part of a circle. Because you just do what you do without any agenda. So when I hear reflected back what the impact has been, (and Dedan felt the same way), it’s like the focus is on us. What the reality is, is that however, magically we met, the integration is both ways.

Beth Tener 

The influence and the impact goes in both directions. I also want to point out Fran, from that meeting, you invited Belvie and Dedan to University of Redlands. They had a chance to join the work you’ve been doing there, which is this amazing: years of classes on compassion and meditation in a university setting. We’ll include stuff in the show notes about the work that Fran has been doing there and you had Belvie and Dedan speak to those classes. And Fran wrote The Power of Love, a  a big textbook for that class, which has a chapter about them. And then later, Belvie came to your class with Liz to talk about Pseads and the poetry work. So maybe you can share about that.

Fran Grace

I want to say how beautiful it was when Liz and Belvie shared the poetry of the children. They came to an online class at the University of Redlands, where I’ve been a professor for 20-25 years. Belvie shares in that class as a guest teacher about her chapter in the book, which is the textbook of the class. For this week,  Liz came and shared videos of the children reading their poetry, where they had been invited by Dedan’s inspiration to make a connection to their own inner being and the being of all, through imagery of the forest, of the seeds, of the plants. And it was so beautiful. The people in the class were intergenerational. There were people in the class who are 92 years old, or 33, deeply touched. I think that was their favorite class session of the whole eight weeks, they couldn’t stop talking about it.

Belvie Rooks 

I will just share this one little thing about Dedan. When I met him, he said that he didn’t have any white people as friends. I said, Excuse me? He said, I don’t have any white friends. I said, But you know, you were active in the anti-war movement back in the day. And he said, Yeah, and there were all these white guys that you obviously had respect for. We had a lot of respect for each other. They did what they said they would do. But we weren’t friends.

I just had this notion that I couldn’t imagine women being engaged in these kinds of really transformative efforts at transforming the culture, and not be friends. So I jokingly say… (he was telling me that because he had already a sense that there was a breadth in terms of the family that I claimed.)

Well, I think you should know I have I have white children.

So it was one of the funniest moments because he thought that literally. I said, Well, you know, they’re just all these people I love and I love them as family. So that was a powerfully transformative journey that you all were a part of, and allowed Dedan to see who we are and can be beyond these various descriptions. It was very important for him. He actually said, once,

“well, when you know better, you do better. And I now know better. I love people because of who they are, as opposed to who I grew up, understanding them to be.”

So it’s been a huge kind of mutual journey of love and feasting.

Beth Tener 

Yes, I can feel that. I hear you saying, Belvie, you don’t want it to be too much about you. But I wonder if we look at it as we’re talking a lot about love here…or that shift from the smaller identity to some larger one. Fran, you talked about as consciousness shift, or we talk about it as I’m part of this web of life or that we’re connecting at the heart level.

Matt or Liz, what do you see happening in that shift from the small self or the despairing self to something that seems to open in the stream of love?

Liz Miller

I feel like in my own life, and then in the lives of all the young people that we’re around, there’s a really palpable kind of constriction of being. Most classrooms don’t feel like they have any breath to them. Most spaces for learning feel like there isn’t a lot of life, like Fran was talking about sort of life-giving spaces. One of the deepest impacts of how Belvie and Dedan’s work has rippled through our lives and work with next generations is these unexpected openings. You feel this life breath come back into the room.

There’s no instruction for how to do that. There’s no manual to say follow these steps and this is how this will come to life. There’s a really deep trust that I think we experienced with Dedan and Belvie, that shows up when you’re able to kind of believe in that space in a new way. I see that animacy, which young people, is really an animacy that I think is deeply missing. No matter how old or young you are. It’s hard to be human being in this time.

There’s a breath of joy that I think is the ripple effect of their work. And there’s a ripple of realness. I remember Dedan used to say to me keep it real, and tell the whole story. I was thinking. what does that mean?

I remember when I was first teaching with Matt, I was such a nervous educator. I would write down every single thing I planned to do that day. I’d write at 1:00, say this. At 1:02, to sit down. At 1:04, try not to move. It was terrible. And Matt, who had been an educator longer than me, was horrified. I didn’t trust myself, I didn’t trust what was going to happen. If something unexpected happened in the space, I felt really afraid.

The more we worked with Belvie and Dedan, the more comfortable I felt with just the humanness of being in a room full of people. The impact of their work is a certain accompaniment that they offered us. Now we’re able to sort of accompany and walk alongside other young people in a way that allows for whatever needs to show up to show up and it all becomes a poem.

The poem isn’t this instruction of like, here’s how you format this language and here’s how you say something smart. Dedan would say, the human being is the poem, the universe itself is the poem. And the Open Heart is the translator of the poem. So it becomes something that can be shared. When young people are able to feel the accompaniment, the permission, the joy, the animacy, that they are, then new things become completely possible. I can’t tell you the number of parents who call us and are like, did you write my kids poem?

Beth Tener 

Because they don’t imagine their child could do that?

Liz Miller

A completely different vocabulary starts to show up. Students say things that I couldn’t write. And these are like, third, fourth, fifth seventh graders who have this wisdom that is sort of untapped. It begins to flow in this really free way. That was the modeling of Belvie, with the circles that they would convene, where everybody belonged, and whatever showed up was what was supposed to show up and it all became part of the journey. They offered these really deep teachings to us spoken and unspoken about how to create spaces of aliveness.

Beth Tener 

I love what you’re saying, Liz, about the accompaniment and the modeling. That idea of when you’re in the presence of someone who carries that much love, and who shows up in that way with you, the way they see you, the way they are with you. It is an embodied knowing. I used to joke and say, I can plagiarize this and go do that for others, right? We naturally live into that in the next relationships were in, which is what I hear in your story,

Belvie Rooks 

Matt, I want to say that’s how I have seen and experienced you. There’s no false face. You’re often quiet, you’re very observant, but totally there and I’ve really appreciated that. Just your realness. I just really want to say that.

Matt Davis

I appreciate you saying that. I was just about to say the same thing about you. Talking about the seed and that quote you read about how you trust the seed. There’s a potency or potential within a seed to unleash itself and to grow. Dedan and Belvie have been able to be the presence of the sunlight and the rain and the Earth itself to allow that seed, to take root and to blossom forth and grow.

I’ve seen that even in my experience of Elizabeth and the length of the relationship we have with all these children. I remember from that first experience. For the first time, I had heard about Belvie, there was this longing and even the language of mother. I have this sense of feeling like she’s got that love, being a mother, that really has, in many ways, defined the quality of the relationship for Elizabeth and Belvie. She has her biological parents, and she has other parents that she’s adopted or has been adopted by and that’s been a very real and substantive relationship. It’s one that I’ve witnessed unleashing Elizabeth’s talent and potential in the world.

If you knew her before Belvie, you could witness that she was certainly had a lot to offer, a lot of warmth and graciousness. But there’s an ease with herself that became present when she learned to be in relationship or had the opportunity and blessing to be in relationship. I’d say the same has been really true for me, I feel a greater permission to be myself. Oftentimes when you work any field, you feel like you have to conform to certain standards and different things. That never really felt very comfortable for me. Having the blessing of Belvie and Dedan in my life has allowed me to settle into myself, in enriching and powerful ways.

I also wanted to just quickly acknowledge the note about intergenerational dialogue intergenerational work, and before I begin, that wasn’t even a concept or an idea that I had ever considered that there would be some cross-pollination that could occur. So much of my life has been really focused on being nose to the grindstone type of thing, like I need to stay focused on the work that I need to do. Belvie and Dedan really helped me look up and see all the other people that are on the road, and how that is a cooperative movement that we need to be a part of.

Belvie Rooks 

So interesting that, as I listen, I’m surprised at how what’s being described are the gifts that were given to me just after the encounter with Dr. King, and us deciding we want it to stay together. And there were elders and adults who stepped forward to make that possible. It was in those spaces where I think it was first time I met adults, who really deeply listened, where I felt seen where I felt heard, where I felt listened to. It was quite extraordinary. As I think about it, in retrospect, as I listen, I realize that was so much of what I was given and I feel I’m surprised at how much I’ve been able to embody and pass on.

Part of listening allows me to have a greater and more depth full appreciation of the gifts that I was given and Dedan, and how we have been able to embody – because you don’t see yourself as an embodiment of all of these amazing qualities and things and beings. But I think that was the seeding at that early stage that has allowed us to embody deeply and share deeply from the same space of love and appreciation, and clarity and being seen that we received. And that’s a new insight for me.

Matt Davis

I imagine all of us have been blessed in so many ways in our lives, meeting different people who have been deeply impactful in our life. When Elizabeth says it’s 29,000 students that we’ve been lucky and blessed to work with, those are 29,000 seeds that are growing in the world in really beautiful ways. And we can trace our lineage back and we could really say that Belvie and Dedan are our mother tree, of that journey that we’ve been able to be a part of in this life. So I am certainly endlessly grateful to both of them, for the modeling of humanity, of community, of love, and being great teachers to us. I hope this conversation doesn’t end anytime soon.

Beth Tener 

To me, as I think about what the roots are, of what ails our modern life, I believe this lack of lineage, this lack of feeling – how do I fit and belong? You can do self-care and self-compassion. You can climb the ladder, but accomplishment and productivity aren’t the same thing as feeling that something was given to you from those elders and the ancestors, and then it flowed into you. It is flow of love into you, you embodied it, and then it flowed down to the next generation. Belvie, what you got to live out in your lifetime that you have flowed down to the next generation and you can see how it’s flowing to the next. That is a deeply beautiful way of living that has such meaning. I think that is like one of those deeper things that’s missing, that we could be more investing, in all over the place,

Belvie Rooks 

Listening to you, I was thinking about how unsung and unseen the legacy of the Civil Rights movement was in how young people with SNCC and CORE went to places like Mississippi, where people had never voted. They listened deeply to people. Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a sharecropper, who got thrown off the land in Mississippi because she registered to vote. People like Bob Moses and Dave Dennis went to her – we’re new here. What would you like to have seen having lived under this system for all of this time?

One of the things they did was make her the spokesperson. There’s a part of the Civil Rights legacy, that does not stress that enough. I just recently did this class on eldering, at UC Berkeley, and we use a book that I highly recommended The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride. In that, you get to see the profound impact of those elders who couldn’t go to school and never finished the eighth grade, who were the holders of, and the elders of this generation of young African-American and white young people coming to the South, saying, teach us what you know. And so your point about the absence of an understanding about lineage, I feel is really an important part of the network that we’re weaving.

Beth Tener 

And Fran, I’d like to invite you back in, if you have thoughts on anything we’ve said, or I can also open up another question for you.

Fran Grace

Well, just this idea of lineage. I had a spiritual teacher that I met, that was to guidance for the book, The Power of Love, and it’s published through Inner Pathway. And his lineage, he said was the inner pathway, it doesn’t belong to some institution. It doesn’t even belong to history. It belongs within. It is the lineage of the heart in which we are all connected and we always have been and always will be. We’re connected beyond human, we’re connected as family of beings throughout all of time, the inner lineage. What I’m hearing with the 29,000 children, and what’s being shared out of Belvie and Dedan’s countless seeds is that they are seeds in so many different areas. It’s that inner pathway lineage. It’s a lineage of our inner awakening to who we’ve always been.

Beth Tener 

We are coming to the end of our time, so let’s see if each of you has any other final thoughts that you might like to share from today.

Matt Davis

Dedan had a great way of talking about expansion. There are a few pieces he’s written and there’s some recordings of him talking about this. He used the stories of his own life and the stories of the universe together in a way in which he talked about the story of the universe as a story of expansion and expansion is itself a place of inclusion. By opening that up, everybody could suddenly be a part of that movement, that conversation, that community, that family with comfort and ease and in that comfort and ease our potential can really come forth.

I’m trying to find all the language is really expressive. But I would say that’s very much at the heart of the work that we try to do with kids as well as to, to model that which have been modeled for us in spaces that allow everybody else to be themselves, and to learn and grow in the ways that feel authentic and true and honoring of their lives.

Fran Grace

When the Power of Love book first came out, there was a 17-year old, who wrote immediately after having read the book and said, I loved all the chapters, they were all great. The one of Belvie and Dedan blew me away, because what they spoke about was something that I already knew deep inside, that I didn’t know it could be lived. I think people hearing this today may be like me, Matt and Liz and Beth when we first met Belvie, it was something that we knew that didn’t quite have words for it, or just, we were younger, and maybe we hadn’t found a way to live in that path, where we all belong together.

As Belvie said, all children are my children, not just the one that I gave birth to and sheltered and nurtured and did everything for. That consciousness of care. So that 17-year old said in that chapter she got something I always knew could be just didn’t know how, or where, or when, and where. Can I go to a tree planting? is what she said. So maybe that tree planting is a circle happening right here.

I wanted to read a poem of Dedan’s from the book, I Give You the Springtime of my Blushing Heart, a Poetic Love Song, which Liz edited. It’s called The Other Side.

The other side is always there.
You shall find it if you dare.
Life is death, turned upside down.
Joy is fear. Just turned around.

Misery’s companion is foolish pride, love and compassion its other side.
There are two sides to everything.

After winter, then come spring, freezing moon, blazing sun.
What seems like two is really three and three is really one.

Liz Miller

I’m grateful that Fran read that poem, because it’s just magical to hear Dedan’s voice. I will share two poems from two third-graders that I just came home with today. The funniest part is, I feel like it’s sort of a conversation between these two third graders and Dedan, but the three become one in the poem.

These third-grade students are very good friends and they wrote these poems, and wanted to stand up and read them in tandem. We had been talking about trees and Dedan’s idea that the tree breathes with you and for you. There’s this beautiful way that the whole world is breathing together. And then our prompt was about sensing the poem in everything. So poem one goes:

I see the life of poetry in everything the light touches.
Everything on the planet has its own story.
There’s goodness in everyone, if you just believe in them.
Every single thing in the universe has its own poem, if you just look to see the real poem inside it.

I sense poetry in the clouds, and in you.
I sent poetry in the wind and the birds, and in you.
I sense poetry in the curling waves, in the green trees, and in you.

And then the second student responds and says,

When I breathe, the galaxy breathes.
My mind is clear and I can focus.
The Kingdom of Love is at my back.
The rhythm of life is calm.
Night stars rise and glitter and the moon whispers to me.
The Earth is happy and quiet.
Trees glow and flowers rest.
A silent Hawk watches over the dreaming land.
In this world we share together.

Belvie Rooks 

Wow. From the mouths of babes. Talk about hope and what’s hopeful!

Liz Miller

I remember Belvie shared with me something that Dedan wrote in hospice, where he talked about the whole earth advocates and how they are arising and are on their way. They’re here and they’re speaking. It just feels so true. And I offer a deep out of gratitude for this conversation, for the chance to be here and for Belvie and Dedan, I just don’t have any words. It’s really been the gift of a lifetime. Thank you.

Belvie Rooks 

Thank you, Beth. So much. We’ve been on this journey, and had so many conversations. You’re seeding the mycelium network of connectedness and hopefulness and love and, and thank you, because that’s the power of love…manifest.

Beth Tener 

Yes. Belvie, I hope that you felt a bit of that accompaniment from us today, seeing you in your essence and wholeness and in the magic that you’ve brought into the world. My vision with this podcast is the lighthouse, that’s the beacon to shine the stories and the insights and inspirations out a little further. I do hope those listening can feel the spirit of what’s here.

In the show notes will be offering links to all these books we’ve mentioned, and to the work of Pseads and to Fran’s books and classes. Thank you all for being here. And I look forward to continuing the conversation.