The Seasons
Learning to recognise character in the living world

Before we look at a single card, we’re going to look at the year.

You already know something about Spring. You’ve felt a morning become lighter before it becomes warmer. You know the mistake of trusting the first sunny day and going out without a coat. You know something about Summer getting too full, the strange angle of Autumn light, and the way Winter suddenly reveals the whole shape of a tree.

Your seasons may be completely different. The year where you live may turn through rain and drought, migration and return, flowering and fire. These pages come from the temperate Northern Hemisphere—the agricultural year in which this deck was formed—but the point is not to memorise someone else’s weather. Look at what change actually does where you are.

Tarot gives us characters and images to think with. The seasons give us somewhere to begin because they’re not really ideas at all. They happen. We don’t have to decide what Spring “means” before we notice what Spring does.

Look first. Feel second. Then ask what kind of person moves like this.

Nature does not stop at midnight on the equinox and change the scenery. Winter doesn’t leave through one door while Spring walks in through another. The ground has already changed before we decide to give the change a name.

The cycle is whole. We cut it up so that we can see it.

Cut it in two and we can see an outward movement and an inward one. Cut it in four and we get Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Keep cutting and we can see smaller and smaller changes. The view changes. The thing itself just keeps moving.

Every boundary in this study is going to be useful. And wrong. “Spring” helps us hold a particular quality still for a moment, but it cannot build a wall around it. Later, when we find something wonderfully Spring-like in the middle of Winter, the map has not failed. We’re finally learning how to use it.

In Spring, something gathers within and pushes out. Roots form in darkness. Shoots meet the air. What has been held safely inside has to take the risk of becoming visible.

In Summer, all that outward life crashes into everything else. Plants compete and cooperate. Fruit appears. Insects eat it. We eat it. Suddenly there are far too many courgettes and you’re trying to give them to the neighbours. Abundance is work too.

In Autumn, the world gives something back. Maybe the result is generous. Maybe it’s disappointing. Usually it’s a complete mess of both. Either way, we have to receive it. Some things are gathered. Some are left to rot. We stop asking what we can make and start asking what we can carry.

In Winter, visible activity pulls back. Resources become important. Structures stand bare. Some things sleep, some die, and some are doing all sorts of work underground where we cannot see them. The dark is not empty. It just makes different things visible.

Four seasons. Four ways change can feel.

Diagram callout

The diagram should show one continuous cycle becoming four readable regions while an unbroken current crosses every boundary.

Now we do something that might feel a little silly. We turn the season into a person.

If Spring walked into the room, what would you notice first? Perhaps they’d look closely at everything. They might touch what they haven’t seen before, ask an obvious question, get excited and then become distracted by something else. Eager, awkward, alert. Their uncertainty is not a problem. It is how they make contact with a world that is still arriving.

We’ve moved from weather to character, but we haven’t just made it up. We followed a path:

1. What is happening?
2. What does that movement feel like?
3. How might a person move under the same conditions?

This will not uncover the one true meaning of Spring. There isn’t one. It simply gives the imagination something firmer than a list of keywords. If our invented character stops matching what we can see, then the character has to change.

The world gets the final word. Annoying, but useful.

The four days ahead follow a very simple path.

Spring will help us meet the Page: the character who encounters, attends, learns, and responds.

Summer will help us meet the Knight: the character who enters movement, chooses a direction, and discovers through participation.

Autumn will help us meet the Queen: the character who receives, discerns, tends, and decides what can be held.

Winter will help us meet the King: the character who contains, integrates, endures, and carries direction within.

These pairings are going to feel quite neat. Too neat, probably. That is fine for now. They are scaffolding. Spring is not the Page, and the Page does not belong to Spring. By the end of the four days, we’ll start pulling the structure apart and looking for every character in every season.

The traditional court cards are made from four ranks moving through four suits. Rank tells us how the character meets life. Suit tells us where: through will, feeling, thought, or the physical world. The seasons let us feel the characters before we start cutting them into cards.

Spend one day with each season. You don’t need to be in that season now. Use memory, imagination, photographs, a garden, a city tree, or the changing light outside your window. Direct experience is wonderful when it is available. We can work without it.

Each day follows the same rhythm:

• Read the seasonal chapter in the morning.
• Notice the physical world before trying to interpret it.
• Carry the featured character lightly through the day.
• Look for the character in gestures, conversations, work, and your own responses.
• Write down observations that surprise or contradict the page.
• Complete the short reflection at the end of the day.

You don’t need an Equilibrium deck for these four days. You don’t even need to agree with me. But try to make the disagreement specific: this is what I saw; this is where the character appeared; this is where the idea fell apart.

We are not trying to finish with four correct definitions. We’re trying to get better at seeing people.

Begin with the smallest change you can notice.

Something has started to move. It probably doesn’t look like much yet.

Look closely.

Continue to Spring — Meeting the Page.