John Yoder traces the arc of a life journey that takes him into worlds so far removed from his Amish boyhood that he could scarcely have imagined them. The journey would take him from Virginia's pastoral farmlands to the remote wildness of Ontario's far North, from the sands of Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert to Central Valley of California and the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains, then to the wide-open spaces of the Kansas prairies before returning "back east," nearer to the place of his childhood.

The arc of his inner journey takes him farther still: from his one-room Amish high school (from which he never graduated) to graduate degrees and to teaching and leadership roles in universities in the US and abroad and to lecturing and consulting across the globe. Though still rooted in the identity inherited from his rural Amish forebears, he has carried those roots into worlds they couldn't have imagined. Places and people are both important to Yoder as he traces the threads of his origins through a life of borders and border crossings and of negotiating the spaces in between them. His story explores how we are shaped by the worlds in which we live, yet how, paradoxically, our personal identity can change but remain the same in a universe of multiple worlds.