On the Banks of Allan Water

When I sing even the first line or two of this song, my voice chokes up and tears start in my eyes. It's not the story, but rather the music and the words together, that produces this effect on me. I wish I knew how to publish the music here, it's so beautiful. Can anyone tell me how to do it?

Allan Water is a river in Scotland, near where I used to live. It rises in the Ochil Hills and joins the River Forth just below Bridge of Allan, Fife. The song is believed to have been written by Matthew. G. Lewis around 1805.

There are lovely pictures of the river here and here and below is a copy of a broadsheet giving the words. In case it's not legible, I have copied the words below.

ON THE BANKS OF ALLAN WATER.

On the banks of Allan Water,
When the sweet Springtime did fall,
Was the miller’s lovely daughter,
Fairest of them all.
For his bride a soldier sought her,
And a winning tongue had he:
On the banks of Allan Water,
None so gay as she.

On the banks of Allan Water,
When brown Autumn spreads its store,
Then I saw the miller’s daughter,
But she smiled no more;
For the Summer grief had brought her,
And the soldier false was he;
On the banks of Allan Water,
None so sad as she.

On the banks of Allan Water,
When the Winter snow fell fast,
Still was seen the miller’s daughter,
Chilling blew the blast.
But the miller’s lovely daughter,
Both from cold and care was free:
On the banks of Allan Water,
There a corpse lay she.

M.G. Lewis.

Locally produced cheese

I couple of weeks ago Rose and I were riding through the streets of Calbayog city, me pedalling and Rose riding in the sidecar, when we saw a street vendor selling cheese. These little thin disks of cheese are made from the milk of the carabao (water buffalo) and are very salty. I don't know why they have to be so salty, and I wash them in clean water for a few minutes before eating them to remove some of the salt. It's the only local cheese, there aren't many dairy cows here.

We bought 100 pieces for 300 pesos (about $5.35). The vendor put his little tub of cheese down on the road, put a plastic bag over his hand for a glove and carefully placed the pieces in another plastic bag for us to carry. He told us they are made in Gandara, a town an hour's ride away, where Rose's brother Rody happens to be the District Judge.


Four piles of carabao milk cheese on our dining table 

Building up high

We are making a tree house for the children. The tree it's in is a star apple, which has plenty of fruit in February/March. I don't actually like the fruit very much, it is full of latex which sticks your lips together when you eat it. Quite sweet and a bland taste. Click on a picture to enlarge it.


Tree house with some wall in place


Tree house getting its roof. That's Sanny up there fixing the nipa shingles with thin bamboo strips to tie them on to a bamboo framework, just as in full size houses here.

A morning shopping with Rose

Rose has begun some exercises again as she has been getting noticeably fatter and flabbier lately. This morning she was up at 4:30, cooked for Claude's lunch then set off to walk across town to her father's place to give a birthday gift to her little niece Shyra. Later as I was going into town on my tricycle to do a little shopping, buy fish and onions and ovaltine, I met Rose walking back home. She wasn't aware of me until I drove the tricycle across her path and stopped. From a rather preoccupied look, her expression changed to a big smile when she saw me. I asked her if she would like to come into town with me and she said, Yes (with another big smile), so she sat in the tricycle while I pedalled it to Co Bu's supermarket. I took some downloaded pages on Quantum Techniques to the printer's to be bound into a book, then we went to Bahooka's to sit outside and eat an ice cream. After that, to the Fish market where I bought fish for us and fish for the dogs. The fish for us was Burao, a common and delicious fish here. I asked for a kilo at 70 pesos (about $1.25).The woman selling it put 1.5 kg into a bag and asked me for 105 pesos ($1.87), taking a liberty. I made her take out the half kg and give me the change from 100, which she did with a bad grace. But the fish was delicious when back at home Rose had smoked it over some smouldering coco shells.

From the introduction to "The Power of Now", by Eckhart Tolle

I have had occasion to revisit this piece today, and want to record it here as it has been an important influence on my life the last couple of years. Tolle writes:


"I have little use for the past and rarely think about it; however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence.
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.
One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train — everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.
"I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self that 'I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real."
I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words "resist nothing," as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.
I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.
That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.
I knew, of course, that something profoundly significant had happened to me, but I didn't understand it at all. It wasn't until several years later, after I had read spiritual texts and spent time with spiritual teachers, that I realized that what everybody was looking for had already happened to me. I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal must have been so complete that this false, suffering self immediately collapsed, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What was left then was my true nature as the ever-present I am: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form. Later I also learned to go into that inner timeless and deathless realm that I had originally perceived as a void and remain fully conscious. I dwelt in states of such indescribable bliss and sacredness that even the original experience I just described pales in comparison. A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy."

If the UN is "morally irredeemable", is there an alternative?

Is the UN morally irredeemable, i.e. should "evil regimes" be propped up by a world body? I have been prompted to think about this by the following piece: it is from the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute is based in the U.S., but I wonder if it has occurred to the writer that by his standards, the U.S. might not be allowed to be a member, since many might call the present U.S. government an "evil regime".

The UN's "Virtue" Is Its Vice
The UN's vaunted neutrality props up evil regimes.

By Elan Journo

More than 170 political leaders from around the world recently met at the United Nations to consider what the New York Times called "the most sweeping institutional changes" in the organization's history. But this exercise was, predictably, hopeless. Although both detractors and defenders eagerly proposed "reforms," they skirted the UN's insuperable problem: its corrupt "ideal" of moral neutrality.

The fundamental feature of the UN is its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations--whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This is upheld as the UN's central virtue and a vital means to peace. Admitting blatantly tyrannical regimes, proponents say, creates opportunities for "dialogue" and rehabilitation. As Kofi Annan explains, the very fact that such "nondemocratic states" sign on "to the UN's agenda opens an avenue through which other states, as well as civil society around the world, can press them to align their behavior with their commitments."

But UN membership did not prevent the USSR from herding its citizens into gulags and forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states; nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators and peaceful ideological dissenters; nor Iran and Saudi Arabia from infusing Islamist terrorist groups with abundant financial means and the ideological zeal to wage jihad against the West.

The UN's policy of neutrality accomplishes precisely the opposite of its putative effect; it actually protects and bolsters vicious regimes.

Participation in the UN confers on them an unearned moral legitimacy. That the leaders of such regimes are routinely invited to speak before the UN rewards them with an undeserved respectability. So it was with Fidel Castro: his self-justifying UN speech after seizing power in Cuba elicited rapturous applause. He was raised to the dignity of statesman--a man who deals in reasoned argument--despite being a totalitarian ruler who brutally silences dissidents. And the unwarranted recognition of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as a statesman arguably began when he first spoke at the UN in 1974. Though such men attain and hold power by force, though they preach murderous ideologies, though they devastate the lives of their subjects--the UN unfastidiously endorses them and their regimes.

The UN thus gives them a means to entrench their power.

Consider, for instance, the beleaguered UN Human Rights Commission, ostensibly responsible for protecting rights across the world. On the principle of neutrality, a country's brutal practices are no disqualification from joining this commission. Indeed, it has become infested with tyrannies; Syria and Cuba, two blood-soaked dictatorships, have each served as its chairman. And through the commission, notorious violators of individual rights scheme to bury any criticism of themselves. A bloc of Islamic countries, for example, self-righteously defends barbaric practices--stoning to death, crucifixion--carried out in certain states governed by Sharia. When a proposal was drafted to censure North Korea, which arbitrarily executes its enslaved citizens, the motion was soundly defeated thanks to Cuba, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and others all guilty of similar and worse atrocities. (The toothless proposal to replace the commission with a new council on rights was foreseeable. Since tyrannies have voting prerogatives on UN "reforms," they will sink any proposed council or mold it into a new shield to deflect censure of them.)

Or consider the money corrupt regimes gain access to. For years the UN has showered millions of dollars in aid on the Palestinian Authority, the interim government in Gaza and the West Bank. That aid, mostly swallowed up by the leadership, has buoyed up a brutal regime that strips its people of their rights, their wealth, their dignity, and foments terrorism against Israel. UN aid has also flowed into North Korea's belligerent Stalinist dictatorship, which starves its people in order to fund an enormous military machine and a nuclear-weapons program. What these handouts do is reinforce the walls of prison regimes like North Korea, exacerbate the misery of their citizens, and arm corrupt rulers.

That the UN benefits evil regimes is a necessary consequence of its avowed ideal of neutrality. The willful refusal to discriminate between good and evil, between freedom and slavery, can benefit only the vicious. It is only an evil regime that fears moral scrutiny, that needs to conceal its crimes, and that struggles for a veneer of moral legitimacy. The UN's policy of moral neutrality is precisely what evil desperately craves: a license to commit any depravity and escape with a reputation for being decent.

No organization can resolve conflicts if it evades the objective difference between right and wrong, and perversely treats an aggressor as the moral equal of his innocent victim. The UN is far from a means to achieving peace. Because it arms and bestows a moral sanction on vicious regimes, it is an accessory to their incalculable atrocities and murders.

No "reforms" can salvage the UN; it is morally irredeemable.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.




Copyright © 2005 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

A lovely letter from an EFT enthusiast

This letter comes via Gary Craig's weekly EFT newsletter. I liked it so much I wanted to post it here.

Hi Everyone,

Catherine O'Driscoll is a proficient user of EFT in Scotland (a non-therapist) and is particularly fond of using it on pets. I've had many correspondences with her over the past two years and find her quite creative. She recently applied EFT to herself while in a depressive state and enjoyed immediate shifts in both her demeanor and her personal insights. I think we all have had our moments like this and Catherine, in her honest message below, holds up a constructive mirror for us to look at.

Hugs, Gary

Hi Gary

Two weeks ago, things were going particularly wrong for me. I had organised two EFT workshops and publicised them amongst the members of Canine Health Concern, but the response was so poor I had to cancel one of them, in England. The other, in Dundee, would have to be cancelled if I couldn't get ten people there. This really upset me - I'm a marketing and PR consultant, so with a great therapy like EFT, I should be able to communicate its benefits. "Why don't people want to heal?" I asked myself. I was depressed - really depressed.

The evening I realised it wasn't going as I had hoped, I found myself being really angry with my husband - everything he did was wrong. In the end, I stomped off into the garden and sat with my dogs, feeling as depressed as hell.

I sat there, complaining bitterly to myself about everything my husband did wrong. And then the thought: "I am such a failure, I fail at everything I do." came into my head.

Do you know how sometimes these thoughts are so deeply ingrained that we often don't see them? But I caught it! I saw myself having this thought! So I tapped: "even though I'm a total failure". Instantly, I "forgave my husband" (who was innocent in the first place). I wasn't angry with him, I was angry with myself - the root of depression, perhaps. In fact, the more I use EFT, the more I realise that the negative thoughts I have towards other people, are rooted in negative thoughts I have about myself. I guess anger and depression are very closely related.

Then I went indoors and hugged my husband, and explained how I wasn't angry with him, I was angry with myself and I felt much better now. He was relieved!

There's a happy ending to the story, too. The EFT seminar near where I live in Dundee, Scotland, now has double the number of attendees I had hoped for. They have all come through word of mouth - and all are already healers of one type or another. I did virtually nothing, and yet all these people are coming - a miracle, perhaps? I feel strong guidance. Apart from spreading EFT, which is a dearly cherished goal, I have already met some wonderful new friends, and will meet more at the workshop this Sunday (9th July). And I am NOT a failure!

As an aside, my husband and I visited friends we hadn't seen for a year, although we keep in close contact. My friend Simon said, "Catherine, you have changed. You are still thinking of the needs of other people, but now you think of your own needs, too." This is a breakthrough for me, and I thank EFT for it. Having myself on the list of people who matter has been a long time coming, Gary. Maybe this is something I can share with the other healers I meet on Sunday.

As all my 'doing' to publicise the workshops proved, sometimes we don't need to DO it, but to trust in a Higher Power.

With love and BIG thanks,

Catherine O'Driscoll