Offices from the Service-Books of the Holy Eastern Church: With Translation, Notes, and Glossary (1863)

Death is a normal part of life, but when Daisy Augusta Andrew died at eighty-one, she threw her son into oceans of self-searching. Of her eight children, he was the only one known to carry a dreadful eye disorder that she had. In his mourning blitz, he tries to follow her departureaan exercise in futility that only forms of poetry could salvage. He stumbles upon her psalms, prayers, chants and sayings and gives them a fresh interpretation asking why wasnat a woman of such faith healed. From the heart of self-discovery, considered his motheras gift to his conscious evolution, he opens up a gentle debate with death and life, Caribbean religious history, ophthalmology, genetics and cure and the urgent reality of a harvest of ideas steaming now in the historic bodies of peoples of African descent. In the shango, her spirit leads him away from mourning. She communicates. He feels. From New York, where he settles down to remember her, he traces superficially his bodyas beginning, childhood fears, pleasures and experiences in a vibrant eco-culture that is his islandsa. Tempered by his fatheras mythology and conscious of her tradition of a salvatory return, he argues that the immortal, the eternal is already upon us, was maybe always with us, in all of us. So a time for dancing has come. Indeed, not only does his healing path welcome all existing wisdom traditionsait is a call from the inner person, the bubbling habitat within for social justice. And it does not wait.