OPINION (AN COLÚN): A sense of loss and hope during Autumn

OVER the October Bank Holiday weekend I joined an old university friend for a couple of days walking in the Mourne Mountains.
As always the walking was superlative in this beautiful mountain range. On the first day we ascended a fine peak called Doan which is in the middle of the range and gives you outstanding views from its summit of the surrounding lakes and hills.
However, we got back to the car early, at two o'clock, and had time to kill. Therefore we decided to go for a stroll in Mourne Park located near Kilkeel. I had been wanting to visit this 156 hectare forest on the slopes of a mountain for a long time, ever since I read a newspaper article waxing lyrical about it. There's been continuous tree cover in the area since the 1600s and the Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland has done a lot of improvement work in the last few years, clearing the place of rhododendron and laurel. They have also created three trails.
Half an hour later we arrived at Mourne Park and began our exploration. I was not disappointed. This is a very special woodland area indeed, quite divorced from so much of our forests where there are too many closely-packed conifers. This was a place which resonated with my poetic consciousness; it was a place of sylvan beauty with a sense of fairy tale.
We were fortunate to explore it during Autumn, a period which one writer called “our second spring” because of its colours.
As we walked in companionable silence I recited in my mind the lines of one of my favourite poems:
“The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.”
Looking at the swans the poet is keenly aware of the fragility of life, of the presence of death. Friends and family members have passed away. Life has often seemed hard-hearted and savage.
“And now my heart is sore,” he writes,
“All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.”
The poet looks at the swans and he sees that they embody a spirit which isn't yet wearied by life, which hasn't become cynical about love - “Their hearts have not grown old.” They drift upon the still water, mysterious and beautiful. When they depart the lake and go elsewhere he will greatly miss their soul-filled presence -
“Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?”
There is also in the presence of Autumn, a sense of decay in the natural world, a progression towards death. As people walk over the fallen leaves of this season they often think about those ancient questions, “Is this life all there is? What comes after our time on Earth, if anything?” In Mourne Park my heart was still grieving because my mother had passed away ten days previously after a brave four-year battle with cancer. The day after Mum's funeral a neighbour gave me a present of a very special book called “Irish stories of loss and hope” (published by the Irish Hospice Foundation). Contained in this book is one of the best descriptions of grief I have read, entailing a glass jar and six balls (of varying sizes). It's a lengthy description which I don't have space for here but basically it puts paid to the notion that our grief diminishes as time elapses. In fact, our grief shouldn't diminish. It would be wrong for it to diminish. “That's what grieving is really like,” remarks the writer, as she demonstrates her points using the glass jar and six balls. “If your grieving is the ball, like the ball here it doesn't get any bigger or any smaller. It is always the same. But the jar is bigger. If your world is this glass jar, your task is to make your world bigger. You see, no one wants their grief to shrink. It is all they have left of the person who died. But if your world gets larger, then you can keep your grief as it is, but work around it.” People coping with grief often try to keep their world the same, she said. “It is a mistake. Make your world larger. Then there will be room in it for your grieving, but your grieving will not take up all the room. This way you can find space to make a new life for yourselves.”