Keira McArthur

There’s a perfect stillness in this house.  A resting of all the places that will later see activity, development, growth.  I need this calm like a desert wanderer needs shelter and green; somehow my little house knows and holds me like a mother would, gentle and strong. What to say?  Good lord and lady but […]

In the face of such continuous and appalling lack of integrity, what are the choices? Deeper roots will hold us all steady in our ground.  Deeper roots will hold the ground steady. Shall we grow roots together?  

Cold toes, bruised ribs from this wiry pull-out mattress, the roar and scrape of post-christmas industrial traffic three floors down.  I keep my eyes closed and read last night’s snowfall from the speed of the passing plough: maybe two inches. A truck beeps itself backwards into the garage, shovels scrape pathways to retail:  Not a snowday then; […]

A twenty degree angle, up from the east to the west.  After 36 hours of fierce but invisible wind, the snow has begun.  I’m relieved. ah, this year, this year. As I would with child coming down from his destructive tantrum, I want to dose this year with a well-laced hot toddy and tuck it firmly into […]

The bells, the paint, the studio cats who complain at the rain.  The reflective work, the promotional, the inquiring work, the rehearsals, the gigs, the scheduling work, the self nourishment which since November 9 has increasingly been – hard work. The grim manifestation of positive, hopeful, pro-active paintings, songs and video as I emerge slow and […]

Sideways. With a wary eye, but kindly. It’s always a risk.  That’s the point, I think – risk. The risk of generosity, of inclusion. If you choose to include rather than exclude, if you offer trust and generosity no matter what, you risk changing your idea, your world view, your mind and your self.  This is […]

It’s a mouth-taste, odd.  Also pit of my stomach when I notice I’ve casually ‘turned over a stone’ and uncovered memories from 13 years ago.  Remembering I ran away then, wondering at the grand plan that overrode those better instincts and pinned me like a specimen inside a story that wasn’t mine. For a decade. […]

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 […]

I’m having trouble reading.  A smorgasboard of fascinating printed material, practically glowing inside beautifully designed covers – right in front of me, and I can’t find the anchor point, the stillness that gives permission to dive in and engage, without great effort. It’s not glasses – I replaced my old foggy set with two exceptionally […]

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 […]

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 […]

I wake among the starlings, deep inside their morning discussion, which centres mostly on comings and goings.  It’s a boisterous, cultural ballyhoodle, ritualized by the turning of the year. Starlings time their arrivals and departures here to the spring and fall equinox, just as we do our school years, our arts industry seasons, interesting.  I […]