When I think of belonging, I think of nature before I think of people.

I’m reminded of the Sierra. The giant Jeffrey pines observing like ancestors, their vanilla scent redolent in the bright sunlight. As a child, I wandered their forest floors on my walk home from school, following the same backwoods trail from the bus stop each afternoon beneath the trees.

And each spring, almost by surprise, the wild lupine returned. They looked as though someone had planted them there years earlier, then forgotten them. Still, the flowers continued returning even when unobserved.

Some years, there were only a few scattered along the trail. Other years they appeared in larger swaths, rising through the thawing earth. Their pale periwinkle blue seemed precious against the woody soil and pine needles, softer than the vivid bluebonnets of Texas. In Tahoe, where the sky and lake held the deepest blues, the light seemed to soften every other shade beside them.

I always picked some for my mom.

Even then, I never wanted to take too many. No one else walked that path, yet I liked leaving some behind. Perhaps just in case, or perhaps simply so the forest could go on observing its own beauty.

And yet the flowers belonged in our home too. By the time I reached home, the stems had already begun wilting slightly in my warm hands.

I loved knowing some secret thing my mother loved, and the joy of bringing it home to her. I loved knowing its name because it made me feel closer to the forest itself.

Years later, at boarding school, a teacher sometimes called me by my mother’s name. My family had attended the school before me, and I assumed he meant it kindly. He understood my genus, perhaps, but not my species.

I never corrected him. There are worse things than being mistaken for someone you love.

In the Sierra, you remember the granite first. The Jeffrey pines. The slick brown needles along the forest floor, the sagebrush and manzanita in the bright sun. Which is perhaps why the lupine always felt so improbable there, its pale blue rising beneath the trees each spring.

Yet it never felt out of place.

Its softness belonged there as much as the granite did.

Looking back, I think the mountains taught me this before people did. The lupine did not disappear into the landscape in order to belong there. Nor did it resist it. It remained wholly itself, pale against stone and lingering snow, while participating completely in the world around it.

The lupine belongs because it arises from the same earth.

The Bluebonnet Seal Debuts

The Lupine Seal was inspired by the wild lupine of the Sierra and the Bluebonnets of Texas, after a fellow Quaintrelle, Val, requested the flower as an emblem of her beloved home state. Though I had long known the Bluebonnet by name, I had not realized until then that it is itself a variety of lupine.

I have always loved the way lupine seems to belong completely wherever it grows. In my native Tahoe, pale periwinkle lupine rise beside granite and lingering snow. In Texas, Bluebonnets spread across entire fields each spring in vivid rivers of blue. In Finland and across the Nordic countries, lupines bloom beneath the endless light of Midsummer.

The flower changes subtly with each landscape while remaining unmistakably itself.

To me, the Lupine Seal became a meditation on belonging. It does not belong through sameness or difference. It simply grows from the environment around it, participating completely in the world that made it.

This seal is about the realization that those of the universe belong in the universe.

Ecologically. Cosmically. Completely.

A Final Thought

During my research for the Lupine Seal, I found myself captivated by the lupines of New Zealand.

They rise along glacial rivers and beneath vast southern skies in colors so luminous they almost seem imagined.

What fascinated me most was discovering that they are also deeply controversial there.

Though beloved by many for their beauty, New Zealand lupines are not native to the landscape and are considered invasive in parts of the South Island. They exist in tension between ecological disruption and emotional belonging. People photograph them endlessly, associate them with summer memories and road trips, and yet conservationists often work to remove them from fragile river ecosystems.

Lupine seems to carry this question everywhere it grows:
What does it mean to belong somewhere?

And perhaps even more difficult:
Can something feel deeply woven into a landscape while not originating from it?

The flower clearly has its own perspective.

With love,

Kathryn