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.
Period of mourning, loss, or disappointment. Focusing on what was lost instead of what remains. Feel the sadness, but don't lose yourself in it.
Read against this new stretch, Five of Cups puts the weight on loss and grief. 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. Beginning to overcome loss, finding hope again. Acceptance of the past.
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.
Allow yourself to feel the pain, but remember: two cups still stand. Look forward.
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.