The Inner Forest

There comes a point - usually somewhere after forty - when you notice that the life you are living no longer resembles you.For Valerio Flavio Sattin it happened in front of a bunch of parsley, on a counter, at the end of a shift. Thirty years in restaurant dining rooms, on cruise ships, in New York, in Riyadh - and for the first time, no words for how he was.He found them by looking at plants.The Inner Forest reads a whole life through a tree. The roots are where we come from and the people we were entrusted to. The canopy is everything we have had to hold up: a family, a trade, other people's expectations. The bark is what we show. The scars are what we became afterwards. Then the season that turns, and the one still to come.This is not a self-help book and it teaches nothing. It is a man taking his roles off one at a time, trying to say what is left.A short book, read in two evenings, for anyone who has stopped recognising themselves in what they do - and suspects that starting again at fifty is not a defeat but a season.