Keira McArthur

It comes in Waves, and each wave is a new teacher. Is this Grief? In any case, these are deeply teachable moments for me. For weeks now I’ve experienced a considerable amount of pain in my left shoulder, especially intense as I lie down to sleep. Tendonosis, I’m told, by the physiotherapist. My tendons have […]

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This sixteen-year-old cat I foster spends her first week here under a blanket. She drinks water and sleeps. Processing, it feels like. The loss of her former foster dad, who had to move into long-term care. The four days she spent at a shelter full of a full spectrum of other cats, all negotiating and […]

You look like a teacher, says the young waitress in the very loud bar the night the Tiger Cats lose the Grey Cup game. She looks like your neighbour’s odd tweenage daughter who dresses like her big brother, a closet spoken word somebody or maybe even closet hip hop but white and really short. I […]

Today the breeze is playful and cool, pushes me out of bed, teases me out of my sluggishness – it was a long night of paying attention to good friendship, while L was in surgery. My liver was talking all night long. It went well, Kate writes, he is resting now. I’m in first coffee […]

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 […]

Ah, the ever-changing dynamics of the ecosystem shared by Art and the Internet.  This has come up in every peer conversation, every artist statement, proposal and grant application I’ve written this month.  Think I’ll write an essay about it & post it here. But this is not my purpose right now.  I’ve been doing some […]

Heart and mind, heart and mind. I was teaching a transcribed Bach Air to one of my cello students today and was brought to tears, once again, by the beauty of that music.  Such a dance between air and sea, earth and sky, leaf and root. I’d forgotten what day it was, actually, until my […]

It’s easy to forget that lists are just the paper they’re written on. Sometimes they need to be gathered in a big pile, taken to a place far away from schedule, and burned. What a relief. It’s a feeling akin to sorting through boxes and boxes of things you’ve been storing in case you need […]

It is re-focus time in the studio.  I have all weekend for this – just one little gig for an hour today, then back at it. I think of studio as a map both for and of my mind.  It’s a container for schedule; a flexible structure that can be altered according to the needs […]

I stare at the handle of a red screwdriver and use my ears to see the space around me.  There are tires scribing the wet street three floors down; the clock ticks each second in counterpoint to the keys on my laptop.  Furnace just kicked in like a huge breathing thing acres wide and deep; […]

I’m drinking good beer in a sunlit window at Free Times Cafe where I used to hang out with my band in the ’80s.  When I arrived the speakers were playing an obscure (to me) Serbian singer doing everything from traditional love songs to hard rock, but now we’re on to Steve Perry – this […]