Keira McArthur

There is too much to absorb, digest, translate, re-form into something good and relevant, and far too little time.  Someone – Leonard Bernstein? referred to this as one of only two things needed to accomplish Great Things.  But when, as my marvellous friend Maria puts it on Wednesday, “every minute of my time is accounted […]

My phone is in Kingston, 200 km of driving sleet and transport trucks ago. I travel through this with my daughter from my aunt to my niece. There’s a rightness to the timing. In the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau I find a plug upstairs after the cafe closes.  There’s a bench with cushions so I […]

Unbelievably, I am reunited with my oldest love, after fourteen years. I was fifteen and vague with deep introversion when we came together.  I had no real tools other than my ears and a fierce invisible longing that Named Me, so I struggled as if blindfolded.  I didn’t know how to properly approach the impossible,  let […]

Only slowly have I become aware of the enormous reservoir that floats above me like a helium ship vast, volatile impossible I am Astonished I’d have noticed it years ago, but I’ve only recently developed the habit of looking up Like the water towers in every small town there’s a name writ in large letters […]

None of us are immune.  Just when you think you can see it all and taste the sunbeam of good finish, a painting problem will like a brick wall whose only purpose is to humble you.  So, laugh or be flattened like Wile E. Coyote, to bonelessly slide down the mountain.  Or both. I pick […]

The clouds are pale indigo-violet, then a blustery bruised grey shot through with long warm lines of golden sunlight  and rich blue – this sets the red reds and the yellow yellows and the living greens in brilliant, stop-in-your-tracks collaboration.  I feel as though I’m watching the gods at play in a game where they […]

I’ve seen it time and again, but it never fails to restore my faith in humanity:  if you gather smart, hardworking teens together under a conductor every week with their chosen instruments and good music to play, magical things happen.  Add 40 degree heat inside the church, a six-week hiatus from playing and a good […]

six am &  bright outside, as we approach midsummer.  It is beautiful, yes.  There are birds, yes.  I will garden this morning, yes.  But not now, damnit. I am distracted by a nagging, irritating thorn that will burrow in deeper unless I pluck it out.  Immediately. As of this past Thursday when my job was […]

I Love it! Here’s my friend Lynda’s picture of 1.5 feet of wet snow in Chatsworth, where they cancelled the school buses this morning. That’s 15 miles from here. One of the reasons we all live here is that WE NEVER KNOW WHAT’S COMING! And we’re better for it. Life is NEVER dull.