Turning Through The Dark

The circadian rhythms of conversion

Sunflowers are towering in our garden this year, over eleven feet tall. The monster height promised on the small packet of seeds sown this spring did not disappoint; we long ago lost sight of their tops above the corn and the hanging gourds. Now their faces are turned toward the still-warm sun, the autumn breezes, the changing leaves, and the swooping birds.

For all the rot this year has held, the garden defied every expectation. To put it simply, this harvest was one of the best because we never left. The unraveled road trip, the untraveled miles, the unspent weekends at the cabin—all of the memories unmade elsewhere added up to abundance at home. We gave the garden more time, attention, and love than we had before. In turn it gave us more tomatoes, potatoes, beans, peas, asparagus, peppers, watermelons, carrots, cucumbers, and basil than we could ever eat.

Above the bounty, the titan sunflowers stand guard, stalwart and golden.

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Young sunflowers have a circadian rhythm, like clockwork. Throughout the day, their stems arch to follow the sun, leaves and faces following the light. Then at night they return to where they were, reorienting to find the dawn again, anticipating sunrise.

This phenomenon called heliotropism is shared by other flowers like daisies and gives sunflowers their very name. Other languages call them the same: tournesol in French, girasol in Spanish, girasole in Italian. Sun-spinners.

They are poetry on the lips, like van Gogh’s masterpieces in the vase, and they stand as sentinels to a mystery I can barely grasp: light and darkness, conversion and change, growth and grief and blinding sun. 

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Suffering transforms. It will turn you upside down. There are no two ways about it: you will not leave the darkness as the same person you were when you entered. 

Suffering itself is also transformed. The shock of the beginning is not the same as the weariness midway or the wrestling acceptance toward the end. There is a strange maturing to each grief, the way you come to live with it, around it, within it. 

Each suffering has its own texture. Some are jagged like broken glass. Some rub wrong like velvet brushed backward. Others are splintering and rough like shattered tree trunks, or slippery and slimy like treacherous river rocks. If you live long enough, you will come to collect your own, unique to you, shared by some but not by all. 

Even if you feel like you have suffered enough, like you have met a lifetime’s quota, you know enough to know the dark will descend once more and you will have to decide what to do in the night. Stay where you are, or turn again to face another dawn?

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The story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb haunts me. Part of me is always there with her, staying to grieve while others rush away, looking for God in the least likely places. I love each Gospel’s version for different reasons: the faithful groupings of fearless women, their huddled conversations on the way, the angels and earthquakes they encounter, and the wild truth that women were the first to receive the Resurrection. 

But my favorite detail comes from John’s storytelling, where Mary turns twice. 

After she bends down into the tomb and finds the angels, she turns around and sees Jesus. She thinks he is the gardener, and then he speaks her name. She turns again. 

Has she turned her back on Jesus? Far from it. More often than not, John’s details are no staid descriptors or stage directions; they narrate the deeper movement of the soul. 

She has turned again. She has converted. She is changed. Nothing will be the same after that second turning. 

Conversion comes from the same root as conversation: a turning-around. By the end of a good exchange, you can find yourself transformed, understanding another’s point of view. Turning like a flower toward light, your face newly warm and open. 

If you let it, this encounter can convert you and change your life.

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Older sunflowers stop turning. Once they are fully mature, they stay open to the east all day, attracting pollinators on their warm faces. This final stage of development is called anthesis, from the Greek meaning “bloom”: the time during which a flower is fully open, reaching the zenith of its form and function. 

Toward the end of their lives, sunflowers stand still, trusting that the light will return, knowing they don’t need to chase it with the same zeal any longer. Enough sun will come for what they need.

What does it mean to stay open to the sun? To fulfill your purpose? To stay rooted in place? Mary Oliver said of sunflowers that “the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy,” and of course she was right.

Sunflowers become food. Their pollen becomes honey. Their seeds are pecked by birds or crunched by animals, even humans. Their stalks will be churned under in our garden, turned into compost for next year’s planting.

I don’t know how to praise the sunflowers while cursing the summer that brought them to us. We had enough light for everything we needed, and still the darkness hangs thick, shrouding my face each night after sunset. All I know how to do is to turn toward the sun, keep turning, yearning, reaching for the light, trusting through another darkness that dawn will rise. 

One day, I pray, I will get to stay facing the sun, resting open to the east, welcoming whatever needs my nourishment. But I am not there yet; no, I am not done turning, and this dogged determination to seek is still my rhythm, day and night. To peer into the darkness. To trust I could hear the Holy One call my name, too.