LEGACY
What we carry
forward.
Pseads has been shaped by mentors who made learning, healing, creativity, and community inseparable from the way they lived.
Integrity and family are part of the method.
Dedan Gills, Belvie Rooks, and Susan Lambert helped Pseads understand that wisdom can be cultivated across generations, that creativity can humanize a room, and that a life itself can become an invitation to learn.
Dedan Gills
Dedan saw poetry in people before asking them to see it in themselves.
Dedan was an educator, poet, social advocate, and pioneer of Green Recovery. His work joined environmental stewardship, community healing, mediation, permaculture, inner wisdom, music, and poetry into one practice of human dignity.
With Belvie Rooks, he co-founded Growing a Global Heart and imagined ceremonial tree planting as a way to honor forgotten lives, heal communities, and care for the Earth. He spent decades accompanying people through homelessness, incarceration, addiction, despair, and renewal.
Dedan became a founding Pseads board member and a beloved mentor to its founders. His poetry entered classrooms from elementary school through college, where students often responded by writing poems back to him. His example continues to shape Pseads' belief that presence itself can be transformative.
Belvie Rooks
Belvie weaves generations, justice, environmental care, and community with deep insight and heart.
Belvie is an essayist, educator, producer, organizational leader, and social advocate whose work crosses civil rights, anti-apartheid organizing, environmental restoration, eco-literacy, community healing, and intergenerational learning.
Her lifelong commitment to human and civil rights was shaped early, including by an encounter with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a national anti-apartheid leader she traveled throughout Africa, monitored South Africa's transition to majority rule, and attended Nelson Mandela's inauguration.
Belvie created Hey Listen Up! and ConverZations That Matter, co-founded Growing a Global Heart with Dedan, taught in higher education, served major social-impact organizations, and co-produced the award-winning documentary The House on Coco Road. At Pseads, she remains a strategic advisor and irreplaceable mentor in community building, youth voice, and intergenerational wisdom.
Susan Lambert
Susan lived by an invitation to "see the extraordinary in the ordinary."
Susan Lambert (1948–2022), Elizabeth Miller's mother, deeply believed in the healing and transformative power of curiosity, conversation, storytelling, art, and women's visions and voices when nurtured in community.
She earned a degree in education and taught before returning to school for a Master of Arts in Photography and Media Studies. Her creative practice included commercial, architectural, portrait, and large-format photography, graphic design, writing, and teaching across high school, college, adult, and professional settings.
Susan authored nine books, including memoirs and essay collections, and approached life with adventurousness, generosity, humor, and a tireless drive to dream. She and Elizabeth began imagining what became the Light Fellowship more than a decade before its launch; a seed grant from Susan helped bring that dream into the world.
Pseads has been incredibly blessed to have mentors and inspirers who champion intergenerational collaboration, and who have been unstoppable in their commitment to learning, healing and building community. Dedan Gills exemplified the humanizing and transformative power of poetry, first and foremost by seeing the poetry in everyone. Belvie Rooks continues to weave conversations, generations and communities with unparalleled insight, fortitude and heart. And Susan Lambert (Elizabeth’s mom) filled the world with beauty and joy through her photographs, essays and spirit. Dedan, Belvie and Susan helped us understand the feeling of integrity and family that is at the heart of Pseads.
I Give You the Springtime of My Blushing Heart
By Dedan Gills and Belvie Rooks | Associate Editor: Elizabeth Miller
This profound afterword reflects the deep and enduring bond between Pseads, its beloved mentors Dedan Gills and Belvie Rooks, and the foundational spirit of community learning. Authored by Elizabeth Miller and Matthew Davis, it captures the magic of shared meals, poetry, and an unyielding commitment to nurturing human connection, dignity, and wisdom across generations.
Discover the book itself and explore the full reflections through our editorial reader experience below.
The first time the two of us had dinner with Belvie and Dedan nearly eight years ago, we got up from the table at least six hours after we all sat down. Dedan wasn’t supposed to cook that night, but he did, putting all sorts of ingredients into a pot and letting them steam and turn until somehow they all seemed to understand each other and become something unexpected. It was a strange magic – this confidence in the coherence of elements and seeming opposites – and one that Dedan seemed able to bring to, and to bring out in, any place he entered.
Dedan began the dinner conversation unusually, without inquiry about where we had come from, or where either of us thought we were headed. Instead, with both an unbreaking gaze and a gleam in his eye, and with just a hint of a grin, he asked: “What’s your thought about synchronicity?” Wrapped within this question was a commitment to experiencing life beneath its surface layers – a commitment that Dedan and Belvie model in a way that opens your heart.
In the years that followed that first dinner, there were countless conversations about poetry, science, spirituality, ecology…but it always came to a single subject: learning. Dedan modeled a singular commitment to learning; he was an insatiable student of life. Where some people seek expertise in one subject or another, Dedan sought to understand the experience of living from every angle.
He brought a signature sincerity, warmth and good humor to learning that allowed him to look with clear eyes at his own self, and to see the dignity and potential in every human being. And he believed in the power of music, poetry and the heart to create change.
With Dedan, we began a poetry and music collective called Avay-i-Janaan (Echoes of the Unseen). Together with an international group of spoken-word poets, mixed-media artists and musicians, we created a series of events intended to cultivate an experience of shared humanity, and to invite people of all ages to join together in exploration and celebration of the way the universe moves through every human being. Everywhere we went, Dedan’s presence and words opened the space like an unseen wave, until there was nothing but togetherness in being.
This way for bringing people together took new shape in the form of an educational nonprofit we decided to call Pseads (“seeds”), for which Dedan was the founding board member. Through Pseads, we have been able to bring Dedan’s poetry into classrooms, and to share it with students, from elementary school through college.
Everywhere we go, students find in Dedan’s rhythms a call to awareness, and in his words, a new possibility of love – for themselves, for the people around them, for the cosmos. His poems touch a yearning to belong, and a thirst for an identity that is beneath and beyond accomplishments, emotion, or the challenges of a given day.
Sharing poems from the classroom with Dedan was a constant joy. There are students who would write back to him, entitling their poem, “For Dedan.” A dialogue has emerged, and with no parameters or prompting. Here are two short poems, written by eighth grade students after reading some of Dedan’s verses:
Create
The journey that beholds you
Pages of a flowing river
Finding paths to peace
Discovering primordial visions of life
Share
The embrace of wisdom
Continuing knowledge
A dancing melody
Sacred thought
All of this work is an extension of the quality of presence that Dedan carried into every relationship and interaction. He rolled up his sleeves in solidarity with young people in classrooms and on hills planting trees, with people of all ages in gardens and boardrooms, and with strangers in coffee shops and on street benches. The thing we’ve always appreciated about Dedan’s poetry is that he was already the poem. And as his spirit lives on in new forms, spoken in the rhythms of new voices echoing his lines with their own inflections and strengthened by his courage to love, we see and witness over and over again how the beauty of one human being can transform the world in life and beyond.
It has been a blessing to know Dedan and Belvie, to learn from them and to hear their voices sing with the natural cadence and rhythm of their hearts. They have opened a window into the soul of love, inviting us all to find that soul within ourselves. It is a constant blessing to experience Dedan living on in classrooms, in the trees under which we used to listen to him, the small waves that accompanied shared walks by the bay, and the kind stories he shared in any moment we needed guidance to see the world and ourselves with greater eyes for mystery and wonder.
May his words drift on through these pages and into the rhythms of eternity where we’ve always found him, sleeves rolled up with a smile, poems and heart-opening conversation – the kind that leaves you never the same.
A bow of the heart to Dedan and Belvie for their unyielding belief in a human community awakened to its capacity for healing, growth and harmony.
– Elizabeth Miller and Matthew Davis