When Sunflowers Stop Following the Sun

“She’d seen a video of a young sunflower turning its head from east to west to follow the sun and then, in the darkness of the night, eerily ratcheting back to face east. The moment the sun rose, the sunflower was ready.

‘That plant,’ she remembers thinking, ‘seems to know when and where the sun is going to rise.'”

~ Veronique Greenwood, The Atlantic

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From an early age, I’ve known that sunflowers turn their heads to follow the sun throughout the day. I remember it was a teacher who saw 7-year-old me looking at a sunflower bloom one afternoon who told me that fact. I didn’t believe it at first, but the next day I returned to the same bloom and saw that sure enough, its head had turned to face the sun.

I was fascinated. How a plant was able to do so—to move as if it knew things—was beyond my level of logic to comprehend at the time. All I knew was that sunflowers were awesome. Almost, magical.

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Image via Tumblr

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High school came, and I developed a penchant for metaphors (mostly because I had to use them for writing feature pieces for the school paper). Of course, the symbolism of the sunflower didn’t escape me. I wrote about how we should all be sunflowers, always looking to the bright side of things, so we can keep on blooming ourselves. It made for a metaphor that was all at once elegant, charming, and inspiring.

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“No flower can lift someone’s spirits quite like sunflowers. They are bright and cheery, and as warm and inviting as the sweet summer sun. With brilliant yellow petals, also known as ‘rays,’ sunflowers have an unmistakable sun-like appearance that has made them a crowd favorite, especially in the summer months.” ~ ProFlowers

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Image by skyseeker via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

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In my college years, I stopped writing pieces for publication and was content to write privately in my journals. With neither the pressure nor the stimulus to stir my writing to be positive and inspiring for the public, my writing became darker as it came closer to the truth of who I really was. Because really, with no public to try to impress or keep happy, I was free to write truer to the core of me. I wrote deeper and deeper into me, shadows and all. So when I say I wrote truer to who I was, I also mean I wrote about darker things.

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“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” ~ William Shakespeare

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Suddenly, sunflowers no longer appealed to me. I found their large, bright yellow heads imposing and almost annoying, like oversized smiley emojis too artificial to be part of the natural world. They were too large. Too bright. Too yellow. 

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And have I mentioned? Only the young sunflowers track the sun throughout the day. Once they mature, sunflowers stop following the sun.

“Mature sunflowers respond differently to the sun. According to the press release, ‘as overall growth slows down, the circadian clock ensures that the plant reacts more strongly to light early in the morning than in the afternoon or evening, so it gradually stops moving westward during the day.'” ~ Merrit Kennedy, NPR

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Image by Anthony Doudt via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

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Then one day, still in college, we had a class activity in which we had to consider a particular color, and then write down the name of the person we associated with that color. I can’t remember what each color represented or what the activity was supposed to help us learn, but I do remember that by the end of it, I was thinking: My classmates do not know me well enough.

Too many of them wrote down my name as the person they associated with yellow. What? I couldn’t believe it. Yellow was cheerful. Yellow was bursting with life. Yellow was young sunflower-y optimism, the kind that moved to always look at the bright side of things. I felt like I wasn’t any of those things. Aand, I wasn’t jaundiced, either.

I didn’t want to accept the association. It felt like a mismatch to who I was, or at least to who I thought I was, to who I felt I appeared to people. I thought I was more old rose. Lackluster and muted, not bright and loud.

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But as any teenager struggling to form her identity, I attempted to reconcile that public perception of me with the private self I was discovering at the time. Was I merely so good at pretending to be Ms. Young Sunflower that I had managed to fool the world? Or was I genuinely giving off a cheerful vibe to the people around me, despite the shadows I was beginning to discover within me?

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Back then, I didn’t really know how to answer those questions. All I knew was that both sides seemed to hold part of the truth to who I really was. One side alone couldn’t define the entirety of me, but I found it difficult to hold two seemingly opposite concepts of myself simultaneously. I thought only one of them could be the real me; the other had to be a lie or an illusion.

It wasn’t until much later (after further study in psychology and a lot more introspection) that I saw the key to resolving such dissonance. I learned we are each made as much by our darkness as we are by light. Anyone who professes he is made of only light, without a stain of darkness, is either in denial or conveniently deluded indeed. It is only by knowing and accepting our darkness, our shadow, that we can truly know ourselves and be whole.

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“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.” ~ Carl Jung, Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology (1959)

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Like sunflowers that stop tracking the sun as they mature, we too begin to respond differently to life as we age. We learn to brave more parts of the day with our heads turned away from the sun, because we realize that we can only know who we are if we let the sun shine behind us and allow it to draw our shadow in front of us, so that we may see how we are really shaped. 

We begin to realize how even darkness has its gifts, and how even if we don’t always bask in the light, we can survive.

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And have I mentioned? When sunflowers stop following the sun, they face east. They still know where the sun is going to rise. They wait for it.

No matter how dark the night was, they know the sun’s gonna come up again.

They wait for it.

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I think I’m starting to like sunflowers again. ♦

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Image by skyseeker via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

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Happy Easter, everyone.

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