Chapters do not start on New Year or on birthdays. They start when something ends quietly enough that you do not notice for weeks — and then one day the old routine simply does not fit. If something in your life has that feeling right now, hold it in mind and turn a card.
Death rarely indicates physical death. It represents the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Something must end for something new to be born. Embrace the change.
Read against this new stretch, Death puts the weight on transformation and ending. Read against a beginning, a card describes what the new stretch will ask of you. Beginnings feel like freedom for about a week; after that they feel like a demand. Knowing which demand is coming is what turns an ending into a start.
The same card has an opposite face, and it is worth holding both. Reversed, may indicate resistance to necessary changes or incomplete transformation. Let go to be reborn.
So sit with the question you arrived with — What is actually beginning here? — and notice which of the two readings you flinched at. That flinch is the reading. It is the one piece of this page that came from you rather than from the deck, and it is the only piece that can change anything.
Don't fear transformations. Every ending is a new beginning in disguise.
You do not get to choose when the chapter turns. You get to choose whether you walk in reading the page or looking backwards over your shoulder.