Keira McArthur

Before she went blind at age 42, she read tea leaves for signs of joy and trouble. Through the subsequent five decades I watched, fascinated, when Grandma took her glass eyes out to clean them, as casually as I now clean my glasses.   For many of those eye-blind years she lived alone in house […]

A rainy 5:20 am in the darkening northern hemisphere.  It is November 1. I was lucky enough to be on the road every weekend last month, to and from Kingston, Toronto, Peterborough.  I drove through ridings filled with campaign signage, fields of shorn crops, hills of red and yellow trees, towns surrounded by housing developments and the occasional […]

The Blizzard’s Promise:  to bring us all closer. We look out of snow-packed windows at white white nothing but white and wind and remember how wonder feels.  What warm is, what nourishment tastes like. It tastes like time.  Like open, endless time. Time tastes a little like fever. Now finally I can… and then I […]

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 […]

In art school we talked about negative space – the less obvious part of any picture that does the most to define the subject.  When building a 3D illusion on a 2-dimensional plane this is one of the neatest tricks – to first define what’s NOT in the drawing, in order to clarify what is. […]

I’m about to leave for a long-awaited trip to Lake Superior.  We’ll take the kayaks, a lovely new tent & good camping gear (the best wedding presents ever); the bikes, some tomatoes from the garden since the plants are now overflowing, books, cameras, and my own cluttered mind, in hopes that the latter can be […]