Keira McArthur

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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 […]

What an intense beginning to October it has been.  It feels like I’ve been birth canal-ed – squeezed into a ‘passage through’ from that September of structural change (schedule, mental, energetic) into this October of ‘Now, GROW’.  This is the first morning of stillness after a massive storm of People and Events and I find myself […]

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 […]

I think about reflection, and Oscar Wilde pops into my intuitive fishing net.  He brings his Dorians Grey for discussion – the beautiful ageless public face and the ever more twisted and toxic one hidden in the attic. Oscar the bon vivant who hides a keenly perceptive heart behind his great wit – he’s good company when I’ve […]

i used to identify with the glamour I can pull up out of my performance joy, as though it was the best part of me. It certainly got the most attention. Now I think of it more like one of many essential ‘functions’.  A runner learns how to run, or a digger to dig- I’m […]

We were told three days ago that the water will not run in our taps until the end of April.  I feel relief.  It’s good to know – that we are directly linked to the spring thaw, that we need to build the gathering and conservation of water into our daily routine, that we will […]

and taps silent, the flow of human traffic increases.  I’m fascinated. It is a commitment of time and effort that would otherwise go unnoticed, this answering of the need for water. As the days go by a growing awareness of value. Mindful conservation where before there was only entitlement. I cleaned the kitchen this morning […]

Snow is both light and heavy, slow and fast, visible and not. It’s a season of contrast. I live in a Canadian province that stretches from Windsor/Detroit (on a latitudinal par with Northern California) to Hudson’s Bay – a stretch between 42 and 57N; from carolinian forest to tundra – “Ontario is Canada’s second largest […]

The Parkdale branch of Toronto Public Library is packed full of people reading, working, talking, goofing around, crying, whining and laughing.  The security guard gives advice to a young girl, who says something like  ‘I just feel like they’re not hearing me sometimes….’. The library is a single floor, nestled in a relatively underprivileged neighborhood […]

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 […]

The cicadas sing their doppler song of midsummer. We are dry as long-dead bones pressed into rock and exposed to a thousand years of sun.  Grass is brown, frogs huddle under leaves in watered gardens to protect their skins from shriveling.  You can hear wood and metal expand in the 10 am heat.  The sky […]