Keira McArthur

Drippy Sunday morning; the world outside has shrunk …which appropriately rhymes with Funk, because Funk is precisely what I’m in. … niggly, prickly snappish me with a million essential things to attend to but instead I chop a fridge full of vegetables and chicken into tiny tiny pieces, beat up a dozen eggs, fry severed […]

Grocery store “…ya, seven car pileup in Dundalk.  I’m not going home to London looks like…” snowfort stories – there were three of us, so …  that’s when the snowbanks along the roads were 14  feet high- we used to run along the top and jump over the hydro lines…  I guess some people like winter, […]

Every once in a while I see a bald eagle in the sky,  like poetry so beautiful and alive I stop breathing. We have entered the long cold of January.  Winter came early this year – two months ago –  to invite us deep inside where we can tend to the root of things, tune […]

It’s the kind of snow there’s a constant More of.  The plows and trucks and blowers, out all night long are still going strong at 10am.  Cars slide gently sideways to stop signs. Kids and grown-ups both are thoroughly snow-suited, booted, winter-gloved and touqued as they kick & trudge through piled white, falling white, blowing  […]

Summer ‘Do’; Winter ‘Be’: This is the natural way of things, if you take your lead from the plants and the squirrels; the chipmunks and the bears. So it follows then, that Spring is for clearing the way for new growth: …and autumn is for making good use of the harvest, putting things into their […]

The morning is still still and grey weighed down by two feet of spring snow.  Even the sky is heavy.  The birds do their best to lighten things up but we have no warm welcome for them this year after the long flight north.  Just heavy grey, heavy snow, covered in old rabbit tracks. It […]

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, […]

I woke in my bed this morning at 6:15, just in time to feel something shift. Winter solstice dawns today with fine fine snowfall out of white into white.  Even the trees are disappearing  – their branches look like fine pencil lines now.  I’m watching the snow fall, listening to the incredible Mychael Danna soundtrack […]

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 […]

The clouds are pale indigo-violet, then a blustery bruised grey shot through with long warm lines of golden sunlight  and rich blue – this sets the red reds and the yellow yellows and the living greens in brilliant, stop-in-your-tracks collaboration.  I feel as though I’m watching the gods at play in a game where they […]