Volume I · Foundation

Before You Begin

You are sitting across from someone you love. Something has shifted between you, and neither of you has named it yet.

Maybe a silence that used to be comfortable. Maybe a sentence that landed wrong three days ago and has been growing in the dark ever since. Or maybe nothing happened at all, only time, doing what time does to the pictures we carry of each other.

You can feel the filters operating. You just can’t name them.

Hold that moment. We come back to it four times, once at the close of each season, and by the last return you will see something in it that you cannot see now.

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Five lenses sit between you and everything you look at.

Your family ground the first one before you could speak. Your culture supplied the second and told you it was not a lens at all, only how things are. If you carry trauma, it added a third that scans every room for what hurt you once already. The fourth was assembled out of what you have read and watched and scrolled past, and it decides which parts of the world feel frequent. Your body is the fifth, editing the picture through fatigue and hunger and heart rate before your conscious mind is handed anything to think about.

Not one of them can be removed. All five can be seen, once you know what you are looking for.

And someone is doing the looking. Behind the five lenses sits an observer who can watch them work and who is not any of them. Meeting that observer is where Spring arrives, and everything Summer, Fall and Winter ask of you depends on the meeting having happened.

If you have ever been mid-conversation and thought I am not seeing the real thing here, I am seeing my reaction to it, the observer is already awake. This book gives it something to do.

Spring turns inward, to the five lenses and to the one who notices them. Summer turns outward, to the person in front of you and whether you can see them without writing your own story on their face. Fall widens to the groups you belong to and the patterns they run without ever discussing. Winter goes to the largest scale, to systems and money and power, to forces operating long before you were born.

Between the seasons sits a chapter on the people we love and the snapshots we keep of them long after they stop being accurate.

Read it in order the first time. Winter without Spring is weather without instruments. After that, open it wherever you happen to be standing.

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There is no test at the end. The only measure of whether this book worked is whether you see more clearly after it than before, and whether that clarity survives contact with an ordinary Tuesday.

That is the standard. Every chapter was written to meet it.

— Marcus Corvin