I wonder about Gifts of all kinds, about how and if we choose to receive them. Not prizes, rewards, entitlements or charity, but Gifts.
Something vulnerable and connective happens around them.
Something shifts. It’s always a story.
Join me in August 2025 at keiramcarthur.substack.com/podcast for a series of audio stories called Tales of Gifts and Wonder.
At this moment I’m barefoot in a wingback chair charting the movements of the mice in my ceiling and the family downstairs (a thump, now tears). Pre-solstice sunlight travels through the plants and across the floor.
After a scan of news from Palestine, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ukraine I wonder: do we learn how to better navigate our anxiety in the challenges of these times? Each in our own context, but also in solidarity, a communion of care. Does the portal of anxiety lead to courage. I wonder.
The broader, wiser me is an old sea captain. Patiently, she charts new shifts in internal weather systems, navigates unfamiliar waters.
The slap of water on leaves is distinct from the thunk onto porch roof, from the plop into backyard puddle. The shearing sound of tires on wet streets, a muffled steady thrum onto asphalt tiles above my head… rainfall is a language as broad as any other. David G Haskell inspires in me a new […]
Dunno what this is, the feeling of being caught in stories that play out for all in the world to see. I am Ms Heard and Mr Depp, both. I am the children & teachers gone, the shooter and the shooter’s mother. Shamed and shaming, scared, resigned and distorted in the hot light of fame […]
Off-grid at the shore reminds me I’m tougher than I think. April’s like a magic pre-shoulder season secret – best time to cut the winter’s deadfall for the wood stove, to see the curve of the forest floor, and feel the full moonlight – silver – on my face. Cozy warm, writing and drawing in […]
In the lane to my cabin there is a tall spruce tree, planted by my parents in the 80s. I believe this is an American Bittern on his way through, spring 2022.
Equinox, and me so tight in the grip of this intense yearning. I want with all my heart to experience a big, booming rightness in us, as humans. A miracle of laying down of arms, of dropping our programmed, distorted behaviours. I ache in every cell of my being for us to be kind, to […]