With the New Year upon us, our social media feeds are flooded with content about setting new goals, creating better habits, and bettering ourselves. However, in the dead of winter, this content can turn into cycles of shame and guilt when goals aren’t fulfilled, and habits aren’t created.
Like the suits of tarot, each year is a story, a predictable pattern of waning darkness and waxing light. In an age so far from tribe and fire, many forget about the seasons, giving little thought to the new hope of Spring, or the community of Winter. Creating traditions that honour the seasons and honouring the different stages of the year allows us to carve out the space to healthily develop new habits.
Tarot reminds us that no card stands alone. Just as the Major Arcana move through innocence, challenge, collapse, and renewal, the year carries us through distinct emotional and energetic states.
As many of us return to working life after Christmas, rest is seen as a low priority, something to be ashamed of or beaten. But rest is not failure, but function, and an important part of life. Winter is a reminder to slow down, to pause, to hibernate before the wildness of Summer begins.
Each year is imagined as a clean slate, a straight line stretching forward, inviting us to move faster, do more, become better. Progress is measured by accumulation: more habits, more discipline, more output.
Seasonal living offers a different story. Rather than a line, it is a circle, one that returns us again and again to familiar states of light and dark. Winter is not a setback but a necessary phase, just as night is essential to the day.
In this way of living, nothing is wasted: slowing down, withdrawing, and conserving energy are not signs of weakness but acts of attunement.
In my own heritage, pagan traditions across Celtic Europe mark the solstices with the wheel of the year, meaningfully breaking up the year and reminding us when to move and change, and when to hibernate.
With Imbolc, on the 1st of February, on the horizon, I will celebrate the ending of Winter, and sow seeds for the rest of the year. In this way, I am creating a natural harmony which sets my goals and habits up for success, in a much easier way than if I was to try and change a month earlier.
The Hanged Man card teaches us that stillness is not stagnation, and the Death card reminds us that endings are prerequisites for transformation. Winter asks for the same surrender. It is a time to slow down, to withdraw, to hibernate before the outward wildness of summer begins.
Living with the seasons asks us to release the urgency to constantly become something new. Tarot teaches us that wisdom is cyclical. Lessons return, cards are redrawn, and meaning emerges through careful listening rather than speed.
Winter is not something to push through, but something to listen to. It is a quiet chapter, one that prepares the ground beneath the soil. By honouring stillness we allow growth to arrive when it is ready, not when it is demanded. In trusting the rhythm of the year, we learn that change does not need to be forced, only met.
— Robbie (700776)