Keira McArthur

The beautiful winds. They picked me up out of sleep, made my first coffee then tucked me in for the morning write in front of the eastern window. A quick scan of the news has filled me with wonder – we all are navigating this new call for quarantine, for self-care, in isolation. Museums close, […]

Alright, I’ve given Paglia a fair shake, but alas, no. The energy required to sift through her self-aggrandizing provocations to find nuggets of meaningful insight is more than I have to spend, especially when other books beckon. Let it be known that I approached her latest with goodwill and open curiosity, and made it through […]

To draw a line. A simple line can identify both home and trespasser. Political lines describe differences, places of meeting:  here and there, you and me, us and them. Natural lines are always clear, but changing.  Shoreline, treeline, river, snake, stick, shadow. Lines can protect the sacred, the private, the personal from the public.  Open, […]

In the corner of my well-collected room there is a gilded chair, with cushions of soft cedar green. I observe both chair and my pleasure in it, thinking how odd it is to have something right there in my room so finely made that the gilding is not ostentatious, but appropriate. I do not sit in […]

I resist the obviousness of GPS as a tool to locate, navigate, identify.  Most interesting to me is when GPS is wrong, as in the case this spring when a K-W woman, travelling in deep fog at the tip of the Brice Peninsula, drove her car into Georgian Bay instead of the Hotel parking lot. There […]

3:56am, sweatered on the couch with the green blanket tucked around my legs. I can’t see them, but I am aware physically and psychologically that I have good, warm slippers on my feet, and that they are a deep, warm pink. In a moment I will pull the reliable stapler out of my purse, turn […]

Home to find the Shire bathed in sunlight and still buried in snow.  Three days home and yet another winter storm howls and screams at my north windows.  It’s mid-march.  I don’t feel in any way inclined to take pictures of this weather. But oh my studio is warm warm.  Full of echoes left from […]

I’ve known many…. The trick with the key, the turn of the doorknob, the double beat of the door closing – like permission to lay the day’s burden down.  I’ve had hollers from the back room, running tackles from the dog, slow blink from the cat – but always the awareness that time moves more […]

I’m home, sick today. It’s a full-stop ‘flu, and I’m bundled in triple layers of clothing – including my dad’s old navy turtleneck & the big red sweater my mom knit for me in 1982.  I am on my third bowl of the excellent chicken soup made for me by incredible friend and husband Grant, […]

I’m home from playing the first concert of GBS’ 2012-2013 season, appropriately titled ‘A Sense of Place’ by our Maestro Mister Barnum.  Thanks, JB, for sitting me first desk celli, where the intensity & pressure is highest.  Lucky me – & I mean no sarcasm of any kind – it was stressful, exhausting, but there’s […]

I’ve been writing a grant application, due Oct 17, drawing sigils for prayer flags that will be cut out of lino, practising Faure & Brahms, blocking in drawings in paintings, printing Rotary Choices, concert tickets, posters, reading Suzuki pedagogy and I’m stuffed full. So now I can release myself into the great river of domesticity: […]

It’s as good a time as any for reflection. 6am, still dark outside in the northern hemisphere. I sit at the downstairs table beside a pinging wood stove.  It’s beaming heat onto the cat, who’s a puddle of contentment. We began this house project in 2006 with the enthusiasm and energy of young saplings reaching […]