The Four Seasons
of the Vine
The question it answers
What is asking
to begin?
“There is a moment in every life when the hard wood cracks and something green pushes through.”
The daily practice
Notice what is pushing through. Pay attention to the green tips. Protect what is just beginning to grow, it is fragile, it is real, and the world will try to talk you out of it before it has set fruit. The work of spring is not productivity. It is permission. Saying yes to what wants to be born.
Illustrations by Li Zhang
ἀνδρεία
The teaching that holds the year and the life as one shape
“Flowering and fruit. Ripening and harvest. Even the dormancy. It is all one thing. It is all beautiful. It is all exactly as it should be.”
Life does not move in a line. Life moves in a cycle.
The grief that took us to the floor. The success that arrived and felt strangely hollow. The middle of a career when the work that thrilled us at twenty-five no longer feeds us at forty. The marriage that needs to be rebuilt every seven years even though nothing has gone wrong. The retirement that is supposed to be peaceful and instead feels like a small death we did not prepare for.
These are not failures. They are not pathology. They are not signs that we are doing something wrong.
They are the seasons and cycles of being alive.
ἄμπελος
What ten thousand years of vines
know that we have forgotten
Humans have been growing vines for ten thousand years. From Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Tuscany to the Barossa, the vine has been the constant companion to human civilisation, watching us rise and fall, refusing to teach us in words, but teaching us in something better.
In its body.
Spring
Then, a green tip pushes through the bare wood. Bud break. The vine flowers. New leaves unfurl. The vineyard, which six weeks earlier looked like a row of dead wood, becomes impossibly alive again. Nothing forced it. Nothing scheduled it. The vine simply knew it was time.
Summer
The flowers fall. The fruit sets. Tiny green grapes appear on the vine, hard and sour and unrecognisable as the wine they will become. The work of summer is patience. Heat. Drought. Storms. The vine does not flinch. Nothing is yet ready. Everything is being made.
Autumn
Harvest. The grapes are picked. The vineyard pours out everything it has been making for nine months. What was nothing in August is wine by April. After the harvest, the leaves turn gold and crimson, then begin to fall. The vine sheds what it cannot keep.
Winter
The leaves are gone. The wood is bare. To anyone walking past, the vineyard looks dead. Except the vine is not dead. The vine is doing the most important work of its life.
In dormancy, the roots consolidate. The vine takes everything it learned during the growing season, every adaptation to drought, every response to disease, every hard-won adjustment to the soil and the wind and the angle of the sun, and writes it into the wood. Into the permanent structure. Into the memory of the vine itself, so that when spring comes, the new growth will carry within it the wisdom of every season that came before.
κύκλος
The two cycles
The same shape, at two different time scales
The vine teaches not one cycle, but two. The same shape, at two different time-scales, both running at once, and the wisdom of one teaches the other.
The year teaches the life.
The life teaches the year.
The vine teaches both.
The Year
Every year of your life is a complete cycle.
Most adults live the year as if it were one long summer. Push through. Keep producing. Treat winter as a defect to be optimised away. The result is exhaustion. We are not built to flower year-round. Neither is the vine. Neither is anything alive.
The Life
Your whole life is also a cycle. Walked once, across decades.
The vine does not regret its winter. The vine knows that what looks like ending is the integration of everything it has lived into the roots, so that what grows next, from it, through it, after it, will carry the wisdom forward.
The Two Together
You are living both cycles at the same time.
You may be in the autumn of your life, and the spring of your year. A grandparent beginning a new project. A retired veteran starting to write.
You may be in the spring of your life, and the winter of your year. A young person who has just been through grief. A child whose family has lost someone.
You may be in the summer of your life, and the autumn of your year. A working parent in their forties at the close of a defining project.
Knowing where you are in both cycles, and which one is asking more of you right now, is the work of wisdom.
ὧραι
Spring
In the year: the early projects, the unexpected ideas, the relationships that begin in unlikely ways.
In the life: childhood, adolescence, the early adult years, the seasons of impossible green energy and impossible vulnerability, when everything is becoming.
Summer
In the year: the long stretches between beginnings and completions, the months of carrying a project, raising a child through their hard age, building a marriage, holding a team through a difficult quarter.
In the life: the building decades, the twenties through the fifties, when we carry the most weight, do the most work, and grow the deepest roots.
Autumn
In the year: the seasons of completion, the project that ships, the child who graduates, the book that is finally finished.
In the life: the harvest decades, typically the late forties through the sixties, when what we built across summer begins to give fruit.
Winter
In the year: the slowing seasons, the grief, the recovery, the deliberate rest, the chapters between chapters.
In the life: the elder years, the decades when the visible work slows and the deepest work begins. The vine that returns to the earth. Not in defeat. In completion.
How to recognise the season you are in
Locating yourself in the
cycle, today
The seasons cannot be assigned by calendar. The vine knows where it is by what its body is doing. So do you.
You are in spring if…
You are noticing new energy that was not there before. A project, a relationship, an idea, an inner shift, something is pushing through. You feel green and unsteady. You are not sure whether to trust it. You are not yet ready to be seen doing it. Honour the green. Protect it. The work is permission.
You are in summer if…
You are carrying a great deal of weight. The work is real, the fruit is forming, and nothing is yet ready. You are tempted to harvest early because the carrying is hard. You may feel hot, stretched, tired. The work is patience. The roots are going deeper than you can see. Trust the timing.
You are in autumn if…
Something is asking to be given. A book. A project. A truth. A goodbye. The fruit you have been carrying is ripening into something that needs to leave you. You may feel reluctant, the harvest is the loss of what you have made. Pour anyway. The vine does not protest the picking. The work is generosity.
You are in winter if…
The world has gone still. The visible work has slowed. People around you may see you as resting, fading, or finished. You may wonder, yourself, whether anything is happening. Something is. Underneath. Below the visible. The work is integration. Trust the dark. Trust the roots. The next spring is already being prepared.
Living the cycle
Three honest things the
vine asks of us
Stop running from the dormant seasons
The vine does not negotiate with winter. The vine surrenders its leaves and waits. So can you. The dormancy is not the absence of life. It is the deepest work of being alive.
Trust that the harvest is coming
Whatever season you are in, the next is already being prepared. Stay with the work. The fruit is forming. What feels like waste is preparation.
Pour what you are given
Your harvest, when it comes, is not yours to keep. It is yours to pour. Pour generously.
The vineyard and the virtues
Two foundational teachings,
sitting side by side
Six virtues, walked across four seasons, across one life. What to build, and when each part of the building happens.
A leader walking through a restructure does not need more Fortitude. They need to recognise they are in winter, not summer, and stop pretending otherwise. A grieving person does not need more Wisdom. They need to recognise that the dormant season is real and there is nothing to fix until ripening returns. A young adult exhausted by the demands of summer does not need to push harder. They need to remember that summer is a season, long, but not endless, and the harvest is coming.
The seasons give the virtues their timing. Without timing, virtue becomes performance. The vine teaches both.
The four seasons, drawn by hand
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Illustrations by Li Zhang
Signed & numbered prints
Limited editions of Li Zhang’s vine illustrations, signed by Marcus J Emsley, author of Wisdom & Wine.
Coming to the Cellar.
Be the first to knowA final word
The vine has been teaching this for ten thousand years.
We are just beginning to listen again.
The wheel turns. The seasons change. The vine that looked dead in winter is already preparing for spring.
Trust the dormancy. Trust the dark. Trust the roots.
The path begins here. Walk in when you are ready.
