The Author: S.A. Snyder
The Book: The Value of Your Soul
The Genre: Nonfiction/Self-Help
Lives in: Herndon
The Stories: A spin-off of S.A. Snyder’s memoir Plant Trees, Carry Sheep, which was released in 2019, The Value of Your Soul is “like Chicken Soup for the Soul, but because it takes place in Scotland and it has sheep in it, I’m calling it a lamb stew for the annoyed soul,” Snyder says. The book tells personal stories of Snyder’s time at a spiritual retreat center in Scotland, where she lived for two years and served as the assistant to the estate manager. “Each chapter can stand alone, and it’s just a collection of stories of here’s what happened, here’s what I learned from it, here’s how those lessons can apply to you,” Snyder says. The book’s subtitle is Rumi Verse for Life’s Annoying Moments because “I find solace in the poet Rumi, so I linked my personal experience with Rumi poetry in the book as well,” Snyder says. (Each chapter of the book is linked to a Rumi verse.) “The book is full of my little pearls of wisdom.”
NoVA Connections: “I moved to Scotland from Montana; that’s where I was from,” Snyder says. “When I came back to America, I moved to Herndon and was living in a very different environment in this corporate world than where I had come from. I went from a very calm, relaxing place to Northern Virginia. It could not be further from the environment I was living in, with this frenetic lifestyle. I really needed a connection back to where I had come from and what I learned from living there. I gained this Zen peace, but then it got disrupted when I moved here. I needed to get back to that [mental] space [so I wrote this book].”
This story originally appeared in the December issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly print magazine.
