Spiritual Winter
Looking for meaning and pheasants, not necessarily in that order.
As a native Arizonan, winter is the most difficult season for me in Utah. It’s dark and cold. Students, worn down from a long fall semester, are eager to be done with school. And along the Wasatch Range we often suffer from “inversion”—a layer of cold, polluted air settling in the valley in periods of high pressure. But none of these fully captures the challenge of winter, at least as I experience it.
Winter most obviously starts at the winter solstice, when the North Pole is maximally tilted away from the sun. So begins astronomical winter. We also think of winter as referring to the three coldest months of the year, and weather doesn’t coincide precisely with planetary orientation, so it helps to have a second concept: meteorological winter. And we also think of winter in terms of cyclical natural patterns—the final falling of the leaves and the migrations of birds from the northern forests and deer from the higher elevations. Those patterns don’t line up exactly with either the planet or the weather, so we have a third variant: climatological winter.
This last concept most closely approaches what’s of interest to me, but since it still doesn’t precisely capture what I’d like to talk about, I am going to introduce yet another term,spiritual winter.
I have in mind those seasons of life when ordinary human aspirations go into a kind of dormancy. It’s not that we have abandoned our desires or given up on the possibility of achieving them. But we have—in some sense—put them on pause. There are times when conditions beyond our control just won’t let us do what we want, though not in any way that impugns our own efficacy as agents. We just have to wait it out. We can remain confident that more propitious circumstances will return, and when they do, we can revisit our aims and make new plans to realize them. The in-between time—when we just have to sit tight—is spiritual winter.
There is a certain coldness to spiritual winter, though it need not line up with any of our other concepts of the season. The winds of disappointment can blow anytime, and they can carry spiritual winter with them. All the same, I personally experience spiritual winter as overlapping substantially with the other winters. Here is the curious thing. I can usually identify the bookends of spiritual winter quite precisely. Or at least, it seems to me that I can. I’ll attempt to describe the most recent ones to you.
Spiritual Solstice
On the morning of December 5, 2020, I was wandering the fields south of Utah Lake. The sun climbed slowly over the Wasatch, but without much effect on the layer of frost covering the white grass near the canal I was following. It was the last day of pheasant season in Utah. Or rather, it was the last Saturday of pheasant hunting season. (In my family, hunting and fishing were never allowed on Sunday. They were the only things we really loved, and so it just made sense that you couldn’t do them on the Sabbath.)
The thing you need to know for this story is that pheasant hunting in Utah is not good. Even in the best of times, it’s not good. It takes a certain kind of doggedness to hunt in Utah at all. By the last day of the season, no one in the field is planning on even seeing a bird. Last year, I flushed exactly one wild pheasant on public land in Utah—a hen (hens are protected from hunters; only roosters can be legally harvested). Seeing the bird take flight struck me as a small miracle; it was hard to believe it was really happening.
You might think that with such small odds of success, no one would be hunting. Strangely enough however, a host of hunters take the field on the final day. They form a small army bearing brightly colored hunting gear and bleak expectations.
With little going on, I stopped to chat with each group I passed. I met a father and son walking along a canal with their dog. They hadn’t seen any birds. But they told me—as hunters do—about the old days when birds were more common, before the suburbs stretched deep into the farm country and before farms were irrigated efficiently enough to eliminate the brushy edges that make for good pheasant habitat. Yet they were still out for their final day in the field. “We don’t hunt on Sundays,” the father told me. I nodded.
I next passed a rough looking man in full camouflage and what looked like a heavy duck gun—a semiautomatic twelve gauge with a long barrel. We nodded at each other as we passed. This wasn’t our first time crossing paths this year. “You seen anything since last time?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Yeah,” he agreed, “Me neither.” When we had passed each other a few weeks earlier—also with little going on—he had told me of the times before there were houses west of I-15, when you could find pheasants all along the valley. Even a few years ago, he said he still got pheasants regularly. By that time they were birds released by the Utah DNR, rather than the wild birds of old—but a pheasant is a pheasant.
Another mile, and another passing hunter hailed me as I passed. Again we exchanged the ritual call and response, asking if the other had seen a bird and responding, in turn, in the negative. He told me that the previous year, he and some friends had been up in a small town in Eastern Montana and had seen one pheasant after another. “Private land?” I asked. He nodded concessively but was undeterred. “You can still find them on the state-managed areas all along I-15 in Montana,” he insisted. I looked at him dubiously, but I could tell he was a true believer.
“Well, I’d rather be there than here,” I offered as a compromise.
“Yeah,” he replied, slowly, “Fall is ‘bout over.” He looked out to the North, and I imagined he was imagining the pheasant-filled fields of Montana-in-his-mind. He broke the silence, “Guess it’s ‘bout time to call it a season,” he said.
“Winter is here.”
Spiritual Equinox
As I write this, the sky is darkening on a fresh snow obscuring the grass beneath my window. The snow is wet and heavy, as it is when winter is on its way out. Winter doesn’t leave all at once, nor does it fade away. It tacks back and forth unevenly. It jostles with an uncertain spring and for a time it’s unclear which will prevail. Yesterday it was 65 degrees. Next week it may snow three days, according to the forecast.
I think spiritual winter works the same way. A few days ago I—for the first time this year—encountered the first break in its cold grip on human ambitions. I was running—or, I should say, “running”—along the Provo River Parkway trail. Passing a grassy hillside, I saw a young couple soaking in the afternoon sun’s meager warmth. They seemed intent on acting as though spring had come, as though by lounging in the sunlight they could encourage its arrival. Going by them, I heard exactly one sentence of their conversation:
“So, if you don’t want to go to the stake speed-dating thing, what do you want to do?”
Such ambition! What could herald spring’s arrival in Utah County if not the inception of stake speed dating? Not only that, but such an event had already been organized and was set to transpire that very day. And the question betrays an even greater optimism. It presupposes that if one didn’t want to attend stake speed dating, it was reasonable to hope there was still another option—something better to be had. “What do you want to do?” The sun may have not been offering much warmth, but something more important was illuminated: the prospect of unknown but valuable options. With no plans for that very night, it was possible to imagine—even expect—that there was something to do worth wanting.
The Meaning of Spiritual Winter
It’s a commonplace to say that we need expanses of monotony to fill the moments of excitement with the meaning they have. You can’t have the rush of seeing a fire-engine red rooster pheasant erupt from the pale fall grass without having first had the hours—days—of silent walking. No one would show up for stake speed dating but for having passed many a winter night in the silence of a dorm room or apartment. In this view, spiritual winter—when ambitious of one sort or another are put on hold—is the prerequisite for spring in more than just chronology. Winter makes space in our values for our plans to have the meaning that they have. Winter is a kind of means to the rejuvenation of our capacity for setting sights afresh on our bigger goals. I’ll call this the instrumental account of the value of winter.
I suppose this is true as far as it goes, but I hope there’s something more to be said on behalf of spiritual winter. The philosopher Dan Moller takes up a related question in his delightful essay, “The Boring.”[1] He writes:
The boring is intimate. Long, boring silences can make us uncomfortable, but that in turn lets us prove something if we come to accept such boredom. The awkward silence in the car on the way home from the first date is the glorious silence on the way home from the fourth or fifth. The transition between the two drives is frightening because it is so awful to imagine ourselves boring others. (“We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.”) And once we have undergone the thrill of mutually tolerated boredom, we have the more ambiguous years of boredom later on—the repetitious stories, the dull nights at home with our spouse in middle age. But these too mean something. There is a social significance, an intimacy to these boring facets of relationships.[2]
Moller doesn’t just say we need the boring to fill the other, non-boring moments of life with meaning. The way he tells it, the boring is valuable for its own sake. It’s valuable for what it tells us about ourselves, and also what it tells us about our relationships with others. It’s being able to share in the boring moments—much more than the exciting ones—that reveals a relationship’s quality.
I think something like this is true about winter. John 10 tells the story of Jesus’s skeptics challenging him.
It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” (10:22-24)
The doubters cannot manage the winter days watching Jesus doing nothing much on the temple porch. In the next chapter, Martha—the hero of the Gospel of John—will also interrogate Jesus on his messiahship. But unlike his temple challengers, who claim they cannot bear the suspense, Martha is willing to suspend her desires and be content with the relationship she has now. She can see the Kingdom of God where they cannot.
My favorite moment hunting in Utah this year did not actually involve hunting at all. I came around a turn in the road and saw a father and young daughter—maybe 12 or 13—holding a freshly shot pheasant appreciatively in their hands. I rolled down my window and waved at them. “What a bird!” I yelled. They smiled. As I neared them, I saw the man was holding an old, weathered, pump shotgun. The girl—a beautifully engraved 20 gauge over-and-under. The difference in value between them was likely in the thousands of dollars. Passing by, I motioned to the father’s gun and said, “You need to get one like hers!” He waved back to me. That was the last I saw of them.
[1] Dan Moller, “The Boring,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72:2 (2014): 181-191. [2] Moller, p. 189.