Articles
In addition to my clinical practice and mental health consulting, I have published several books as a professional author and have contributed articles to various publications. My writings tend to be focused on the interconnected themes of personal development, creativity, mental health, and trauma. These are the areas of my professional work — but more than that, they are themes of infinite depth and scope. They reach out and connect to everything. As an author, I’m interested in the same things that I seek as a counsellor: a greater understanding of the unfolding story of every human — of humanity itself — and a deeper and more meaningful contribution to that endless interwoven narrative.
Mental Health & Well-being
The Jasper Queen
An Ancient Face Reminds Us of Our Humanity
June 18, 2021
The indomitable spirit cannot be diminished — by negligence, by war, by time spun farther than the grasp of memory. This occurs to me on September ninth, 2001, in the Egyptian gallery of New York’s...
Object Lessons
Trauma-Informed Practices in Museum Settings
June 18, 2021
The oil lamp is small and fragile, worn down by almost two thousand years of accumulated grit, corrosion, darkness, and time. It was shaped by hand, with unfired clay, by a refugee fleeing Roman pe...
Big Problems: Small Wonder
Wandering, Wonder, and Creative Pathways
June 18, 2021
Got a minute? Try this small but illuminating experiment. Above is an image of the Milky Way Galaxy. Focus your attention on this image for one minute. Don’t do anything other than look at the imag...
Mental Health and the Creative Encounter
A Conversation with the Vancouver Art Gallery
June 30, 2020
Art objects have always offered a point for departure to explore emotions, perspectives, and the imagination. How are object interactions impactful in our current moment...
Canada’s Inaugural National Conference on PTSD
On Healing Trauma in Canada
June 18, 2021
I was invited to present at Canada’s inaugural Conference on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The conference was focused on ways that new legislation might support those with PTSD, provide pathways ...
Inaugural First Responders’ Mental Health Conference
Trauma, Healing, and Pathways Forward
June 18, 2021
Firefighters, paramedics, and law enforcement officers experience traumas and stressors on the job that are unlike those seen in most other occupations. It’s not surprising, therefore, that recent ...
Mental Health Considerations for Museums
An Emerging Field of Practice and Discovery
June 23, 2021
For information about workshops and training offered by Ross Laird, please visit this page or contact Ross directly. There is a growing trend in museum practice to evo...
Working with Grief, Trauma, and Related Challenges
Museums Offer Much Potential for Healing Work — But Safety Must be a Primary Concern
June 24, 2021
Adapted from Museum Objects, Health and Healing , by Brenda Cowan, Ross Laird, and Jason McKeown. New and powerful museum exhibition trends include a greater focus on emotional engagemen...
Therapeutic Objects at the 9/11 Museum and Beyond
The Meaning and Use of Personal Objects in Complex Trauma
June 24, 2021
Tragedy strikes New York on September 11, 2001. Afterwards, survivors, first responders and victims’ relatives experience the healing impact of donating personal objects to what will become the 9/1...
Resilience and Well-being in Turbulent Times
A presentation for the Ontario Museums Association
June 30, 2021
During a time of turbulence and stress, how can we stay emotionally healthy and connected to ourselves and those around us? What kinds of coping are normal and helpful? ...
Creativity Practice & Process
Wind
Opening to the Creative Process
June 24, 2021
I step off the gravel path, here where the shimmering summer air gives way to a darker quiet in the forest. A woodpecker perches on a nearby cedar, its rhythmic tock echoing clearly through the tre...
Earth
Grounding in Creative Work
June 24, 2021
The tips of my fingers are grimy and black, like a coal miner’s. Dark, umber streaks trace their way up my index and middle fingers, smudging into the pores of my skin, outlining the bloody scratch...
Thunder & Lightning
Following the Path of Inspiration in Creative Work
June 24, 2021
Out here on the road, with the power lines down and early morning light from the sky my only illumination, I watch a cascade of small branches drift across the road in a gust of wind. I’m not sure ...
Deep Water
Depression, Fatigue and the Shadow Side of Creativity
June 24, 2021
Today the work is tense, rushed, possessed of a sharpness I feel inside, as though I might crack open from the cold. The heater is cranked up, I’ve opened the door to the adjoining furnace room, an...
Mountain
Stillness, Meditation, and Opening to the Universal
June 24, 2021
This little Stanley block plane, the first woodworking tool I owned and still one of my favorites, has a surprising heft. I cradle it in my left palm, sole up, where the contours of the lever cap —...
Shallows
Joy, Wonder, and Connection through the Creative Process
June 24, 2021
This rowboat is old, worn down so thoroughly by memories and by the sea that it seems, resting atop two sawhorses in my shop, almost insubstantial. The overturned hull is faded and chalky, crackled...
Fire
Illumination and Discovery in Creativity
June 24, 2021
Light, and fire. This is how it begins, far out on the horizon, beyond the threshold of shadows and the deep well of the land’s erasure. A vermilion hue like the grain of purpleheart climbs into th...
The Unfathomable
Following Creativity Back to the Source
June 24, 2021
The idea of making a mask — or a series of masks, if all goes well — came about as the result of a weekend trip that Elizabeth and I took to Tofino, on Vancouver Island’s west coast. It’s a rugged,...
Education & Learning
Education and the Unhappy Family
Changing education is like doing family therapy
June 19, 2021
Counselling is my primary career, the practice to which I am most devoted and for which I have the longest, deepest experience. Counseling will always be my primary vocation. But I am also an educa...
Intelligence of the Heart
Education as Personal Development
June 18, 2021
I spend a great deal of time with two kinds of people: teachers and students. In some ways, these two groups are at opposite ends of the continuum of learning. Sure, teachers and students co-create...
Creativity and the True Teacher
On Teaching, Learning, and Leading
June 18, 2021
I stand in the dark, watching the lighted lamps pass. Lantern-bearers follow one another upon the spiraling path. They glide through the darkness, almost silent, their faces dimly lit by the glow o...
Lamplighters
Finding My Way through Educational Culture
June 18, 2021
On the first day of the semester I come across one of my students huddled in her car, shivering, crippled by panic. Later that morning, another student begins to cry as I walk with her toward the b...
Taking Learning Outside
Our Heritage in the Natural World
June 18, 2021
Adapted from Object-Based Learning and Well-Being , edited by Heleen Chatterjee and Thomas Kador. We meander up the gravel path, through the evergreens, between the stands of alder. The s...
On Developing Knowledge
Building Capacity, Exploring the Edges of Knowledge, and Finding Ways Forward
June 25, 2021
This page is the first of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts two and three for the full s...
Skills for Working with People
Integrating Academic Knowledge with Personal and Community Development
June 25, 2021
This page is the second of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts one and three for the full ...
Skills for Working on Yourself
The Inward Journey as an Educational Pathway
June 25, 2021
This page is the third of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts one and two for the full set...
Craft & Culture
Casco: The Ship of Robert Louis Stevenson
The Lore of a Storied Craft
June 18, 2021
They were led, one at a time, from the smoky dark of the hold and up the narrow companionway. Each man was flanked by a crew-member who spoke in clipped and rushing tones. The ship was quiet, the s...
Rogue Waves
Wanderers of the Sea
June 18, 2021
In February 1933, on its way from San Diego to Manila, the US Navy ship Ramapo was caught in the teeth of a relentless storm. The wind had slowly gathered momentum across thousands of nautical mile...
Myths of the Primordial Waters
Ancient Seafarers, Human Migration, and the Sea
June 18, 2021
Plato wrote that the past is like the wake behind a boat; it spreads, and diminishes behind us, and merges with the surrounding sea. The past rolls under and is gone. We stand upon the foredeck of...
The World Tree
Conservation and Conflict in Burns Bog
June 18, 2021
South of the riverbend, twenty minutes along a trail fringed with pink flowers of hardhack and gangly stalks of sweet gale, a black spruce that I call the World Tree stands against a spring sky. He...
The Resonance of Nautical Language
Curious Words Persist from a Bygone Age
June 18, 2021
In 2003, paleoanthropologists digging on the island of Flores (about 550 km west of Bali) discovered a previously unknown and now extinct branch of the human genetic tree: Homo floresiensis , dimi...
On Woodworking as Meditation
The Craft that Leads Inward
June 18, 2021
The warehouse is quiet today. An oldtimer carefully selects maple boards from a small pile at the back. Along the central aisle which stretches into shadow two of the staff move slabs of African bu...
Wood Finishing for Marine Use
Steps for Longevity and Lustre
June 23, 2021
Woodworkers and boat builders are, on the whole, a contentious bunch. They argue about all kinds of things: tools, methods, aesthetics, materials. But their favorite topic, the one to which they ha...
A Guide to Ethical Wood Use
What Woodworkers Owe to the Natural World
June 23, 2021
We tend to think of the tension between pristine nature and human ambition as a contemporary struggle, but the urge to own and exploit forests is a fundamental human impulse. At every point in hist...
Choosing Wood for Marine Applications
Navigating the Bewildering Array of Possibilities
June 23, 2021
In an age of plastics and composites, wood has not surrendered its claim on the mariner. The color and texture of grain, the particular warmth of wood in the sun, the way a teak gunwale is shaped p...