What your Pinterest board is telling you about your creative season
I was sitting with a client recently, scrolling through a Pinterest board she had built for our first session together, and I felt something shift in my body before I had any words for it. There was so much yellow on the screen, open windows and hands in soil, a single seed splitting open in dark earth, cherry blossom against pale sky. Before she had told me anything about her project, the board had already told me where she was: in the very beginning of her Spring.
I have been using Pinterest this way for years now, both for myself and inside the Rooted Creation Session, where it is the first thing I ask people to build before we begin shaping anything. Why? because it’s a direct translation of where their creative system actually is, often before they have words for it.
What the images know
The images we are drawn to in a season tend to be much more honest than the words we use to describe ourselves. Words can be edited, filtered, shaped to match what we think we should be feeling. Images bypass all of that. We save what we are quietly hungry for, what our body is reaching toward, what the eye lingers on when no one is watching. The board becomes a kind of weather report from the inside.
When I look back at my own Pinterest history, I can trace the seasons of my own work just by scrolling: a winter where everything I saved was dim, interior, candlelit; a summer where I wanted nothing but bright tables and open hands; a long autumn of bare branches and grey water. None of it was conscious. It was just what landed when I scrolled.
The four creative seasons and their visual languages
Most people are taught to think about creative cycles in terms of strategy: when to launch, when to rest. I think about them differently.
The four creative seasons are not a calendar. They are a felt landscape,
and each one has its own visual language.
Spring tends to arrive in the body as restlessness, an urge to begin, ideas surfacing faster than you can hold them. The images that land in this season are often pale yellow, first sun through a window, chamomile and lemon, seeds and soil, hands cupped around something small. There is a quality of light that feels like return rather than abundance. If you are saving images like this, your creative system is telling you something is beginning, even if you don’t yet know what.
Summer is generative and outward. The images get warmer, more saturated, more peopled. There are gathered tables and open doorways and bodies in motion, fuller light, more confident colour. If your board has gone gold and warm and full, you are likely in your Summer.
Autumn is harvest and shedding. The images soften and deepen. There is more brown, more red, more gold leaf, more smoke. You start saving images of completion: a finished meal, a closed book, a coat being put on. The body is asking you to gather what you have made and to let go of what you have outgrown.
Winter is interior, slow, dim. The images become candlelit and still. You save photographs of empty rooms, snow, single flames, hands wrapped around mugs, more black and grey and cream. Most people misread this season as a creative block, but the board is telling the truth: this is a season for rest and composting, for the underground work no one will see until next Spring.
How to read your own Pinterest board: the P.A.T.H. practice
This is the practice I use with clients in the Rooted Creation Session, and the one I use for myself when I am trying to understand which season I am in. I call it the P.A.T.H., because it works as a small ritual you can return to whenever your creative energy feels foggy or hard to read.
P — Pause
Before you open Pinterest, take a real moment to land in your body. Sit somewhere comfortable, take three slower breaths than usual, and let your shoulders soften away from your ears. The point is not to clear your mind. The point is to arrive in your body so you are scrolling from your felt sense rather than from your thinking mind. The board you build from a regulated nervous system will tell you something true. The board you build while you are still in browser-tab mode will only tell you what you are reacting to.
A — Assemble
Now scroll, and let your body lead. Don’t curate or try to make it beautiful, and don’t think about whether the images go together. Just save anything that makes you exhale, lean in, or want to look longer. Anything that creates a small yes in your chest. Give it fifteen minutes or so, and aim for twenty to thirty pins. You are not building a brand mood board. You are building a mirror of how you actually feel right now.
T — Translate
When the board feels full, look at it as a whole and start to write down what you notice. Not as analysis, more as quiet observation. What colours are dominating? What kind of light? Are the images mostly interior or exterior, peopled or empty, warm or cool? What are the bodies in the images doing, and where are they looking? Then turn what you see into one short sentence about how you actually feel right now. Something like: my system is restless and reaching, or my system is quiet and asking for rest. The sentence is the translation.
H — Honour
This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that makes the whole practice land. Once you have named the season your body is in, choose one small action that honours it. Not a productivity plan. Just one thing. If your board is telling you Spring, maybe it is opening a fresh document and writing the first messy sentence of an idea. If it is telling you Winter, maybe it is closing the laptop earlier and walking outside without your phone. The point is to let your body know that you heard it.
The board is your weather report. Read it, and then respond.
I have written all of this up as a downloadable PDF, Find your P.A.T.H., that I send to everyone who books a Rooted Creation Session, so you have something to keep returning to as you move between your own creative seasons.
If something is starting to stir
In the Rooted Creation Session, this is where we begin. Before we tune into the frequency and felt sense of your project, before we shape anything, before we even talk about what you want to build, we look at the board you have made and we read what your body is already telling us about where you actually are. Knowing the season is essential, because the same project shaped in Spring versus Autumn will ask entirely different things of you, and of the world.
If you are not yet sure which season you are in, I made a free quiz that takes about three minutes and might name something you have been feeling.
You can find it HERE.
And if something is starting to stir in your work but has not quite found its shape yet, the Rooted Creation Session is a 60-minute one-to-one space for exactly that beginning.