Keira McArthur

So much anxiety. Even here, in this small town Shire-like piece of Ontario, we dutifully find our regular dose of Fox news or its equivalent so we can chew on our worry in a bizarrely informed way. If not Fox or Sinclair and the suspicious smell of fascism, or the use of our tax dollars […]

…dear Minus 25 Degrees Celsius, dear 70 km ph Winds and your Death-chill-Factor, Thank you for finding a way to freeze a substantial part of the city’s water system – at the very point in our heavy winter when we collectively agree to become grumpy that the world is not green and growing. The first […]

These days begin in darkness and wet. We live in multiple layers of clothing against the cold damp of constant seeping rain, walk under umbrellas, and peek out from under shelter until some blue sky appears. Then we breathe the blue and the coloured leaves, and roll in the damp ones underfoot.  We go to […]

Rehearsing and conversing with the highly engaged and engaging pianist Marc Pierre Toth and composer Richard Mascall last night, the day after dinner with pianist, singer-songwriter, electronic artist and visual artist and dear dear friend Kati Gleiser – and snowshoeing with her today.  Talk  – of Shanghai, Japan, Hannover, my neice Anna in Germany, The […]

Open-faced and shovel-sore, I stare out the window at a thousand-thousand demons of whirling, whipped snow.  I think about beauty, and the job of art. If there can be a line we take towards healing the terrible distortions of our belief systems, I think it must be drawn by artists.  There can be no measured, […]

Our covenant with Winter:  that there will be space and time to contemplate, to examine and re-examine,  to be still.  In the rich pianissimo of deep snow, quiet things sing their subtlety, small things hold great significance, and you can see the wind. I cannot imagine a life without this. I awake with the phone […]

A black squirrel just yelled at me for 3 straight minutes while hanging upside-down on the trunk of a downtown spruce tree. Was that because I was reading a book about Jungian psychology while sitting in a red car and wearing a red sweater?  It can’t have been for no reason whatsoever, so it must […]

inspired inspired by all the input these past few days – New Zealand, Ukraine & the Balkans (via Toronto), Russia, Romania, Rwanda, Scotland – folks from all these places gathered here to talk, play and sing about change & re-volution.  All of it a huge call to collectively change the way we think.  Well, I’m […]