The Wisdom of Wildflowers. Heather Robbins

      Silvery Lupine

      It rained last night, not a lot, just one of those showers that washes the dust off everything and leaves the air clean and cool. I am out for a quick walk this morning. Everything seems renewed and energized after the rain, and each breath I take is a cool, healing embrace of my spirit. Mother Nature has again performed one of her many duties and made everything right with the world.

      My boots glisten like polished marble as they brush against the still damp grass. I continue down the path until I come to a steep precipice. The earth has slowly eroded away, leaving a bank of tanned clay and jagged rock.

      At the bottom of the bank stand a dozen or so Silvery Lupines. They look so regal in their royal colors. A cluster of purplish-blue blossoms cling dutifully to the pale-brown stem, decreasing in size as they approach the top. Daisy-like, greyish-green leaflets spring from the bottom of the stem, as if they are ladies-in-waiting ready to serve.

      This flower not only reminds me of the tall, outrageous hairstyles that royal women like Marie Antoinette used to wear in seventeenth-century France, but also how those women, including our own Queen Elizabeth II, epitomize the words duty and responsibility.

      One of the least inspiring words in our vocabulary, duty is something that most women know all too well. And just like our current Queen, we are all immersed in duties and responsibilities of one sort or another. As much as most of us would like to wake up one morning and live a carefree existence, the cold hard fact is that we all have duties and responsibilities to look after, and we cannot ignore or walk away from them. How are we tending to those duties and responsibilities? And how do we look after them without sacrificing our health and well-being in the process?

      It is so easy for us to fall into the “habit” of looking after everyone else first and putting ourselves last. That is something most of us unconsciously do. We perform juggling acts every day to stay on top of all our duties and responsibilities. When we are strong and healthy, juggling is a breeze, but when we are stressed and weak, we start to drop the balls. It can be difficult to remain strong, healthy, calm, and composed in our lives while the shifting, prairie winds of unrelenting duties continue to swirl around us. The lesson of the Silvery Lupine is that our first duty is to look after ourselves.

      God made women to be the nurturers of life, and as soon as we entered adulthood, most of us found ourselves in nurturing and caregiving roles. We have become very important to a number of people, whether it is family, colleagues, employers, friends, or volunteer organizations. They count on us every day to perform our duties, and most of the time we do not disappoint. But when we are tired and have spread ourselves too thin, everything connected to us can pay the price.

      In order for people to lean on us for support, we must be well-anchored with very deep roots. Roots that hold us so securely to the ground that nothing will knock us off course. But these roots will only sprout and grow strong when they are nourished and tended to. We can provide that nourishment by looking after ourselves, and tending to our own self-esteem and self-worth. First and foremost, our duty is to develop and nurture those thoughts and feelings within us because our roots will only grow stronger when we take care of ourselves.