A Lullaby for Nem-nem (Highland Cathedral)

I’ve been very taken with a tune I found (and what it necessarily has to do with Christmas re the album I have no idea). I’d kept thinking it captures my feelings about Nem-nem’s arrival, and that I’d like to use it in my video here depicting my idea of that. I’d kept meaning to look up the song origin and finally did. I at first mistook it for one of many old Scottish folk tunes but it was apparently written by two Germans in 1982 for a bagpipe festival in Scotland. It’s called Highland Cathedral. Two prominent sets of words (at least) have been written for it; I very much like this set:

There is a land far from this distant shore
Where heather grows and Highland Eagles soar
There is a land that will live ever more
Deep in my heart, my Bonnie Scotland

Though I serve so far away
I still see your streams, cities and dreams
I can’t wait until the day
When I’ll come home once more

So Lord keep me from the harm of war
Through all the dangers and the battles roar
Keep me safe until I’m home once more
Home to my own in Bonnie Scotland

On first reading these lyrics, I was overwhelmed by the coincidence that the tune both expresses my feelings about Nem-nem’s birth and that these lyrics are so similar in several ideas to words I wrote for Mago’s Lullaby:

So together we’ll hie
Through the sky love, and fly
To the sunny bright places we’ll see
With the Irish we’d die
For our mothers would cry
For the days to be sunny and green

Both are songs of a fair distant land of my ancestry, both speak of soaring/flying, both refer to battle (that’s what I mean by “With the Irish we’d die”).

So Highland Cathedral is Nem-nem’s lullaby.

I’ve got Scottish blood, so I suppose it isn’t necessarily fair to give the Irish all the attention (as I do with my children’s nicknames). But I don’t have any children for England, or for Wales (yet), or..

I’m also struck by allegory in the words; Nem-nem arrives from a distant land she left (her place with God) to serve in a battle (the war for souls on this earth) and will long for her eternal home. So I sing it in homage to both God and my ancestors. Further, I hadn’t even realized when I wrote Mago’s lullaby that it maybe could work allegorically in the same way.

Here is the song with this video for Nem-nem; only it isn’t so “lullaby” here, though it can be sung that way and has been child-tested and found to work. It’s versatile. Click the image.

The stills in this are deep space photography which I color-alter, distort, zoom, pan, cross-fade, and change lighting of to give a sense of travel, merging into the opening sequence from CONTACT reversed and sped up. CONTACT had it wrong. In that film, pious scientists/priests repeatedly declare that the remainder of space without any life apart from Earth would be a “waste”. On the contrary I feel it isn’t about how far we can look or travel out there and whether it means anything to anyone else, human or alien, but how amazing, beautiful and meaningful it all makes our existence here. Not that life elsewhere isn’t compelling.

Incidentally, I hope my video, while philosophically in great sympathy with this amusingly distasteful schlock I found at YouTube, may be better. Even a little better would fill me with hope.

These were Tia’s comments on my video: “It’s good”. Later I sought clarification on this:

“So you like it?”

“I don’t like that music with it. This Scottish tune to that.. it doesn’t fit.”

“You’d appreciate it more if you appreciated Star Trek.”

(Derisive sarcasm) “Well, yeah.”

“You don’t remember [Star Trek II Spoiler!] [spoiler]the bagpipes at Spock’s funeral?”[/spoiler]

“Did I ever see [spoiler]Spock’s funeral?” [/spoiler]

“Well, there you go. It’s really good, I recommend it.”