Out of Apples

On overflowing, depletion, and the tiny book that changed everything

Decades ago, I found a tiny book on a dusty shelf in a used bookstore. I don’t remember why I picked it up — something about it just pulled at me. It was called Out of Apples, by Lee Schnebly.

The whole premise fit on a napkin: you can’t give from an empty barrel. Give from depletion and you’re not really giving, you’re collapsing. Give from a full barrel and it’s generative instead — it doesn’t cost you anything to overflow.

I closed that book and looked at my life. All the giving. The running on empty. The way of being that indicated not just low maintenance, but zero maintenance kind of gal.

And something in me cracked open. What if taking care of myself wasn’t selfish? What if it was the actual prerequisite for everything else I wanted to give?

That tiny book changed something in me. It didn’t tell me what to do. It just handed me one true thing at exactly the moment I could finally hear it.

I’ve thought about that book while writing Rewilding Yourself. Not because I think I’ve written Out of Apples — that book did its job for me a long time ago, and it did it in a tiny little unassuming book. But because I know what it’s like to be cracked open by something small, unassuming, found almost by accident. And I wanted to write something that could do that for someone else.

I don’t know who will find this book, or when, or what part of it will be the sentence that stops them mid-page. I can’t engineer that — nobody can. I just know it’s possible, because it happened to me once, off a dusty shelf, from a book I’d never heard of and can’t fully explain why I picked up.

That’s the whole hope, really. Not that everyone reads it. Just that it finds its way into a few of the right hands, at a moment when someone’s ready to hear one true thing.

And I trust that it will. 💕

The backstory — Zoe, the Alchemist, is the character and painting that quietly became the seed of the book Rewilding Yourself and the Field Guide years before either existed.

If you’d like to follow along week to week, I send out a post every Sunday on Substack. Join me there.

Warmly,

Suzanne

P.S. Rewilding Yourself is available for presale now, ahead of its October 7th launch. It’s a journey home to your most authentic self. If any part of this found you, I’d love for you to have it.