My name is Kesia
and I have been making music and stories and pictures since I was a small child with an awkward haircut and a Fisher Price tape recorder, a Hilroy notebook, and a disposable Kodak camera. I am perpetually in search of wildness.
In 2016,
fueled by 1) the responsibility to provide a small herd of horses I had somehow acquired with enough room to roam as their natures intended; 2) a shared need for big, wild spaces; and 3) a lifelong semi-apocalyptic back-to-the-land proto-idealism, my mother Sharon and I moved from our respective homes in Vancouver to a small cabin made of telegraph poles on several hundred acres in Northwestern BC, 1200 km away. Here, with help from our family and friends and neighbours and a beloved Englishman, we have scratched out a bustling homestead to experiment in mixed and regenerative agriculture, to learn how to care for ourselves, the land, and the animals in as direct and simple a manner as possible, and to stretch and grow into the fiendishly large selves we all actually are, when we’re allowed to be.
Now the music & the stories & the land
have become inseparable for me. They inform each other and they grow together, as the filaments of connection under our feet grow stronger and brighter and thoroughly entwined. I hope you can find them in each other; I hope you can hear the land and rivers, fire and horses in my songs; I hope you can feel the earth under your feet and warm breath on your face when you look at my pictures; I hope you know the kind of love I feel when I tell you my stories. And if you ever walk this land too, I hope your heart will be full of your own songs, and sights, and stories.
Looking For Horses
is a song I wrote long ago while walking in the mountains of Andorra, between France and Spain, quite literally looking for horses. I was hoping to join the transhumance, an ancient and annual movement of livestock to greener pastures. I wanted to see hundreds of horses moving freely in bird-like flocks over routes many millennia old – instead I found myself walking alone in an uninhabited valley; sitting around a candlelit table with archeologists at a remote camp; wallowing through hip-deep snow in battered sneakers with a backpack full of yogurt while humming a repetitive little tune and reconsidering my place in the order of things. I never found any horses that time, but I did learn other languages and make peace with my own species and discover my rooted attachment to the world and open my heart to a thousand souls and find the edges of who I was and gather them up into something more solid. I moved forward from that point completely changed and a little more whole.
The horses are a symbol for whatever we are seeking; they are the North Star that guides us as a reference point for home. Getting there is inconsequential: it’s what we stumble across on the way that shapes us and the way we are in the world. Looking for horses is how, essentially, I have come to where I am.
What are the horses you are looking for? Where will they take you along the way?