Tulip's Peace TUITIONS

This flower has amazing cups as petals in which it coaxes you to hide your soul's woes if you have any. Or else, you can just stick your nose into its yellow-orange-golden-red throat and sip beauty.

Though it has no scent, the tulip calmly collects its fans, even stealing some from the rose, with its loveliness packed up in its radiant ribbons, buttons and sleeves of grace with a new design to startle you. It may decide to dress up as a princess wearing a rainbow dipped in gold or suddenly grab a nun's habit of plain white and grey.

It will clamber up to the skies wearing lemon yellow slips, then change into slumbering red to flirt with the clouds.

Every flower gifts you with its blessings. The scented rose can instantly cure you of bad smells from your day, swollen with jealousy, slyness or slime. The nasturtium flower and its petals can make you a peppery salad or a curry. The wild red poppy is used for treating coughs and insomnia. Even the water lily is used in cooking.

But the tulip only pampers you with the power of its innocence. It teaches you to sit still and be blessed by the sweetness of silence. This mysterious gem lures you into the idea of sacred gardens now becoming popular all over the world. They are teaching us how to make even the smallest of such gardens  in our houses, flats, or better still in entire communities where peace and hope will always wait for us.

Now there is a Sacred Land Project in Europe through which community groups create new gardens in old and deadened, ravaged and bedraggled places - old railway lines, war torn fields, ancient temples, churches or graveyards. Bristol is planting a garden for the memory of children who died in the great cholera outbreaks of the 1840's. In Norfolk, Sikhs are making a garden around the tomb of their last Maharajah. In Germany, an ancient quarry is being healed with a garden to bring people of different faiths together.
Tulip tuitions are very simple to learn - when angry or hurt by life's malignancy, first wash up, walk a lot, keep away from talkative, troublesome meddling or muddled corridors - read a  lot and always take time out for a long rest in the sacred spaces of your solitude. You will come up again, breathing fresher air with the tender tulip tuition salad.