Opinions vary on tulips. I know, I know, I can hear your gasps of disbelief from here. And yet opinions vary: Not everyone appreciates tulips. Some people find them boring. Like, OK but over-rated, maybe? Like, too “one note,” perhaps? Maybe. Perhaps.
It’s certainly not their subtlety or complexity that I look forward to: My aesthetic tastes are simple. (Uninformed, maybe? Uneducated, perhaps?) Their splash of colour across an otherwise brown, grubby landscape reliably lifts my heart: a harbinger of better days to come, maybe; a reminder, perhaps, that today isn’t all that bad.
I plant tulips in cold autumn soil where they wait through even worse, and just when reason says I should give up, Boom! Colour everywhere.
Maybe the other things I try to plant in what seems like unreceptive soil–in the world, in my community, in my own self–are like the tulips? Perhaps they, too, will eventually blossom when the time is right?
Maybe. Perhaps.
Can’t you just see it? Boom! Colour everywhere.
Oh, Isabel, I do so pray, for you, for my wavering self, for all of us. Now, I always will see tulips that way. Even one tulip, such as the lingering reminder in my untended garden of the days when it had warm and near companions, becomes the reason “that today is not that bad.”
Laurna – It’s good to hang onto whatever beauty we can find. Even the sometimes-maligned tulips. 🙂