Keira McArthur

Wifi is not strong here, which is just fine. Simple is Peaceful; I am off grid, charging my battery with sunlight. . …while waves come in from the north east to lap at the shore, while the forest birds sing, while the shore birds fish and the earth side of my feet soak up heat. […]

Three days at the cabin, full moon, gentle lake, a tree frog chorus every night, the loons calling, and trumpeter swans. Feeling much better than I did.

I had such a great plan, before CoVid-19 changed us. A working car-trip across Canada to Banff residency in the summer or fall (Banff is of course now closed, all programs cancelled into early fall), an artist residency in the Shetland Islands for a month, where the shore meets the land and the land calls […]

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 […]

This 2015 Canadian election. I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve spent online trying to write through and responding to ‘stick with the brand’ thinking, or the conversations that possibly should have been more focused on personal issues. At the beginning of each day I tear myself from Guardian articles and online debates about […]

I’ve just read a paragraph in an alternative american news source I trust, in reference to an incident of ‘personal is political’ in Asheville, North Carolina: The misogynist (woman-hating) viewpoint is currently embodied in this thing we’re all just hearing about for the first time, called Red Pill culture. Simply put, this is a social […]

Do we all have a natural buoyancy?  I wonder.  Some call themselves ‘sinkers’, and describe the great effort required to stay afloat.  This is subjective, of course. Effort, to some, is a thing to be minimized if not avoided altogether.  To others effort is a joy,  a ‘coming to meet’, a solid, positive investment in something […]

Summer grows into Autumn. In two weeks I play cello for these, and for Gloria and the Oboe Concerto in F (more info here); it’s good to have such a soundtrack to live and work by.  Thank you, Vivaldi, for composing this music 300 years ago. I listen to II mvt of the Oboe concerto as […]

There are four new paintings living in my studio as of last week.  The experience of watching them come to be was shared by good friends – an artist, a poet, a songwriter, a filmmaker, a composer throughout the day and evening a week ago. Here’s where they came from – a photo of my painting wall […]

The morning raising of the bedroom window blind reveals a bright blue pipeline stretching east-west across the backyards of our neighborhood block, turning north at my forsythia bush. I look out the front of the house onto our street and it’s filled with orange trudging men. It’s raining water and corn snow as I ask […]

“..last year the pipe to the barn froze in February and didn’t thaw again until May 15. Nothin’ I could do about it, so we hauled water…”, said the farmer beside me in the feed store. Of course then I added my story of hauling 30-60 litres per day depending on house activity, “…well over […]

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 […]