All that is good and nice and proper must be set aside before attempting to read this jolting and marvelous book.  It’s not a work for self-proclaimed conformists, but anyone who has an inkling that something vital and important might lay beyond the confines of our everyday, civilized reality would benefit from undertaking the journey.

In deliciously poetic prose, masterfully interwoven with myths and poems that incite the imagination and break open the heart, The Other Within compels us beyond the tyranny of civilization‚s metaphorical wall, and towards the crossroads of identity—the place where we might reclaim the frightening and ugly parts of ourselves that we’ve banished due to society’s addiction to order and normalcy.  Why go there?  Because, as Deardorff states, “Only by admission of, and surrender to, the deformities and defects of self and soul can we experience any portion of wholeness.”

Here at the crossroads we find “Trickster Wisdom”—the wisdom that teaches us how to be “outsider” and “inside” simultaneously, holding both identities in dynamic and generative tension.  Trickster Wisdom is the wisdom of paradox; of maintaining disorder and never losing our connection to the darkness and chaos of the beginning; of “slipping the trap” of the imposed identity that society projects upon us; of giving equal weight to the worlds of intellect, instinct and intuition; of playfully examining and blessing the shit of life.  For without shit, nothing can blossom.