Growth, Rhythm, and Darkness

What’s on my mind?

Growth, rhythm, and darkness—and what it means to stay open to change and keep questioning everything.

I keep being surprised by how much we actually share with plants. We literally run on the same ATP-based energy system, use the same basic amino acids, and we use the same genetic code (the codon-to-amino-acid translation table).

Recently I heard a conversation that’s been hanging around in my brain ever since.

On John Kempf’s Regenerative Agriculture Podcast (Episode 168 with Mollie Engelhart), he talked about how plants follow a 24-hour rhythm: they collect energy from light during the day, then use that stored energy at night. He shared that in many plants, a lot of growth activity happens during the darkest hours of the night—roughly between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m.—the time when it still looks like nothing is happening.

John went on to connect this to spirituality.
What I walked away with, and have been sitting with all week, is this:

The bright, “easy” seasons of life are when we quietly build up capacity, perspective, and resilience—so that when we hit the dark, hard seasons, we have something inside us to lean on.

John has interviewed Mollie twice. I don’t know her personally and haven’t gone deep on her story, but from those two conversations I took away this: she’s allowed herself to be radically open to change. Her belief system has been upended as she’s learned and grown.

Whether you agree with where she’s landed or not, I really admire two things about her:

• Her willingness to question her own beliefs and stay open to the possibility she might be wrong.

• Her courage to share publicly what she used to believe versus what she believes now.

In a world that’s quick to judge, it would be so much easier to quietly edit our past and only present the “current version” of ourselves.

That’s where this gets personal for me.

Listening to her made me ask:
If I respect that kind of transparency in someone else… what does it look like for me to share more openly too?
And maybe for you as you read this?

Maybe the thing that makes me uncomfortable is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Hard seasons can feel like a harsh pruning or a storm: miserable and confusing when they’re happening, but sometimes followed by a very real flush of new growth. Rest and darkness aren’t wasted time. They’re often when the real rebuilding happens.

And just like with plants, timing and environment matter.
Support, safety, decent sleep, nourishing relationships—those give us the capacity not just to survive hard things, but to grow from them.

That’s one of the reasons we have a “safe space” process at my office.

If someone asks for a “safe space,” it’s our cue that this is a conversation where we:

• listen first

• assume positive intent

• allow people to misspeak or be messy

• focus on understanding, not punishment

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not the mistake that defines us—it’s what we do after.

In my experience, growth isn’t a straight line and it rarely happens during the crisis, when everything feels chaotic and exposed. It happens afterward, in the quiet work:

• therapy

• journaling

• walking

• hard conversations

• sitting with uncomfortable truths

• sorting out what’s actually ours to carry and what isn’t

All the slow, internal stuff where the actual restructuring of the self takes place.

The visible event—the big success, the breakdown, the pivot—is never the whole story.
The real transformation usually happens later, in the dark, when no one is watching.

If you’re in a “nighttime” season right now, I hope this lands as encouragement:
it might look like nothing is happening on the surface…
but it could be that you’re in the exact window where most of the real growth occurs. 🌱