Legacy

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