The Market Cycle - Ouroboros

In the soft dirt of spring, the rabbit is first to appear.

Before the thaw is complete, before the frost has fully retreated from the roots, the rabbit emerges—tentative yet vital. Its presence is not just a sign of life, but of motion: of systems awakening, cycles restarting. In every culture that has ever turned soil, the rabbit has carried a message—now begins the time to grow.

So it is with Markets.

Just as gardens need warm soil and seeds sown with care, markets need confidence, optimism—belief. A belief that things can begin again, that value can sprout from intention, that investment will yield return. Markets, at their core, are stories about hope disguised as math. And each spring, like the rabbit, they reappear: bushy-tailed, bounding, irresistible.

But not all rabbits are lucky.  There is one, a solitary figure in the mythology of capital, who emerged hungry—not for roots or clover, but for something more elusive. Profit, perhaps. Growth without limit. It ate too quickly. It fed on credit and leverage, on speculation and shadowed promises. And when the food ran out—when spring stalled and the soil trembled—it turned on itself.

A rabbit devouring its own tail, jaw locked in instinct or desperation, is a mirror. The myth of the self-consuming rabbit is the myth of the Market Cycle—an Ouroboros with fur and fear in its eyes.

In economic parlance, they call it correction. Recession. Collapse. But the rabbit knows none of these words. It only knows hunger. It does not ask why it must keep feeding. Only what is left to consume.

The ancients understood cycles, but they also understood pacing. Farmers rotated fields. Sailors watched winds. Markets, though, too often sprint—driven by algorithms that do not sleep, by expectations that compound like weeds. And so the rabbit runs faster. Until it turns back toward what it never questioned: its own soft flesh.

Yet even the ouroboros, that ancient symbol, holds meaning beyond despair. It is not only a symbol of destruction, but of return. A system devoured may also be reborn—if it remembers the cost of eating blind.

If it remembers the spring, and the hope of good times yet to come.

*This is a photo-copied print from an original etching. The description comes with it.