Longford ready to take a hold of its future again

Time has stopped and time is never-ending. So it is that we’ve come to an end of sorts to our years-long journey.

For nearly two years the whole of this little county has been on a soul journey, holding out on the frontlines of the heart and the head as we battled an unseen enemy.

That battle came to a détente last week as the Government announced that restrictions would be lifted so that we could go back to our lives. From Dublin to Ballymahon we all uttered a sigh of relief. The Taoiseach himself said that he looked forward to the coming spring, a spring like no other.

It’s not been an easy journey and we have lost loved ones along the way. I’m conscious as I write this piece today that there are over 6,000 people who never got to this new land.

So much has happened in the last two years. Life changed far beyond what we knew in the last two years.

We have known privation and death, sadness and quiet joys. It has been a transformative experience, one that has changed all of us.

It has in ways been a sort of soul delay as we waited, waited for better news, waited for illnesses to pass but there was living in this time too.

We bought homes, had children and celebrated all the ordinary joys of life. We have lived through a transformation of the soul and a transformative of the self.

But what is a soul? In Judaism and Christianity, it is the immortal essence of a living being. In the east such as Hinduism, all living things have a soul. The actual self is the soul while the body is the vehicle to experience the karma of that life. It's all lofty stuff but freedom and souls do go hand in hand.

To be free is to have a soul that can achieve its aims. No one wants to be restricted in their lives. No one wants to be hemmed in.

When the good news came last week there was a collective lift. From politicians to farmers we breathed relief for the first time in two years.

As I see it now we here in Longford have held out on the front lines of this change. It is in nature that we can see that the world continued on, that it was waiting for the first time in a long time for us to catch up.

We realised that despite all the control we humans exert on this earth that we too can be shaped by it and guided by it.

And now the spring is here, Saint Brigid’s day has come and with that Celtic Spring. On the farm, the place I know best there are calves and lambs coming into the world. They are here to remind us that though winter is the dead heart of the year this new season is full of promise, full of potential.

Walking and running the roads of North Longford this week I could see that there was a smile on peoples faces again.

That we could greet each other like old times that each person had a welcome that hadn't perhaps been in their hearts since all of this started. We can all welcome each other again.

Last summer I journeyed down the Camlin river on a canoe, down the length of our great spiritual river of this county. It flowed all the while through this pandemic giving us solace, guiding our lives.

As I journeyed down that river it reminded me of the trek we have all been on and how like all great rivers every journey does come to its natural end.

There in Richmond harbour in Clondra, I thought of how we would live to see this day. That our rural hearts would be full again.

There are many things that we will not miss about his pandemic but there are things we learned too that should not be discarded so quickly.

We say that the meitheal of the spirit is still alive, that we as a county, as a community pulled together from nurses to teachers from farmers to grocery store workers. We all played our part.

Walking in town this week I saw a county ready to take a hold of its future again. We have been through so much but so too the future looks bright. We have held out on the frontlines of the heart and the head.

The great soul delay that gripped us all is lifting now. A pint, a chat, a catch up with a friend are all possible once again because we all played our roles.

Our spirits are lifted and rightly so. For myself, I look forward to the social occasions and the nature of being together again unafraid whether it be a match at Pearse Park or a drink and meal in PV's. It's here for us once more.

The pandemic was a teacher as much as we perhaps don’t like to think it. It has made us appreciate the ordinary bounty of life. We are stronger, wiser, better people now. The world is waiting for us once more.

We do not know what the future holds, no one does but we are ready I feel for the next phase of life.

Like that long canoe voyage down the Camlin there were rapids and shallows there were rips and breaks but the river flowed on and so can we.

Out there on the horizon now is a new county waiting for us all. Go gently wherever you go and keep a prayer in your heart for those no longer with us.