ROSS A. LAIRD

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 and share the environment of learning; but what I hear from each group is different. Students (of all ages) talk about the many ways in which the learning environment fails to meet their needs. Teachers, on the other hand, tend to talk more about how to preserve and nurture that learning environment. In this sense, both groups are working toward the same goal: to make the learning environment useful and purposeful. But I find that they have radically different notions about how to accomplish this goal.…›

In January I will once again be offering several courses in creativity at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. These courses, which are all interconnected around the theme of purposeful play, are designed to help learners discover, or rediscover, the authentic joy of intentional, self-directed learning. The courses are developed as collaborative spaces, as environments of exploration, as opportunities for each of us to claim the fundamental right of creative action. …›

The oldest and greatest poems, epics, and songs – the original roots and branches of all literature – are articulated visions. They are dreams, glimpses of other worlds (real or imagined), archetypes of clear seeing. This clarity of vision defines good literature, and is therefore the ultimate aim of practicing writers. Yet various impediments arise to obscure our sight, the way a bank of low-lying cloud hides a shoreline glistening with pebbles. As writers, sometimes we become disoriented by the many conflicting tools of our craft, by contrary examples and advice, by the spinning compasses of style and voice. Our path becomes uncertain, the shore distant, vision muddied.

And yet the shore is not far, and reaching it requires only a steadfast purpose; and, of course, awareness of the fog. To dispel that fog we must avoid its common traps, which are our own habits in disguise. Below are the most common. Find them in your work, excise them, clear your vision. …›

That horizon stretches out. You know the one. It lies on the far side of a vast, unknowable plain punctuated by our dreams and fears and fantasies of what might be. The horizon retreats as we tread upon that plain, as we encounter the figures and actions of our passage. We watch the horizon, we wonder about it, we follow our footsteps along an indistinct line that meanders in that direction. Call this line destiny, or fate, or the labyrinth, or whatever you like. It is the path that we take.

The oldest extant works of human creativity are close to 100,000 years old (yes, I know, not everyone agrees about this — but just go with it). The artifacts of creativity can be remarkably persistent. Yet the past is littered with silent evidence, fragments and snatches of the stuff that was destroyed or misplaced: lost books, paintings, sculptures, cities. (Cities? Yes: the ancient city of Akhetaten was deconstructed brick by brick, during a religious squabble, and scattered across the desert.) Today we know a vanishingly small amount about what has been lost. Sure, we have some texts that describe or refer to lost items (say, Plato describing Atlantis); but we will never know anything about almost all of the creative artifacts of human culture. They are gone.

Some popular views: the primary school system stifles creativity; high school is a minefield of bullying and conformity; university is a treadmill for earning increasingly irrelevant acronyms. The education system done be broke.

Teaching (in its various forms) is one of the most influential roles in society. After parenting, it is perhaps the most crucial, for all ages. And yet, teaching — whether to children or adults — is a profession in which few practitioners have any substantial training. Some instructors have certificates or degrees in teaching, but there’s so much to know about the subject that most good instructors pick up their best skills after training, in the field, thinking on their feet and trying to keep learners awake.

The landscape of education has changed more rapidly in the past decade than in the previous hundred years. New technologies challenge established norms. Emerging practices promise new modes and methods. Cultural, economic, and social changes encourage (and perhaps even demand) a comprehensive review of what education is, and what it’s for. We are — to put it mildly — living through an age of educational destruction and renewal.

Social media, online technologies, mobile devices, and many other recent developments have transformed our social and educational landscape. Laptops and handhelds have replaced pads and pencils. The utility of digital text has surpassed that of the written word. Attention spans have shortened while cognitive plasticity has increased. In the midst of this sea-change, educators have tended to hunker down, freak out, and yearn for the good old days.

Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.

In many ways, creativity is a mythological journey. Its patterns and paths are known and mapped — this is the function of art. Creativity offers the way forward, if we choose to follow it. And, as creativity has the potential to be an aspect of every human endeavor, we can follow the creative process in everything we do. Creativity can bring us into closer relationship with ourselves, our loved ones, one peers; it can guide us through our travail and our turmoil. It is a source of great solace in a world of uncertainty. It is a wide path, and it begins with:

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. Here, within earshot of the encroaching highways of suburban Vancouver, a broad bole streaked with umber meanders skyward.High up, an eagle rides a crest of sea air, glances down, then spirals away. Through a lattice of dark branches restless with vigor, nomadic flecks of blue sweep toward the horizon. A rustling brown blur in the canopy – squirrel – cracks a narrow branch.Underfoot, a long skein of root twists out from the great trunk, meanders toward a bristled head of cotton grass. The quick trill of a robin sounds nearby.

Running, more than any other single human activity, is consistently correlated with health, healing, and well-being. Running is generally more effective than therapy for psychological challenges, is generally more effective than medicine in treating all kinds of ailments, and is the closest thing we have ever found to a panacea. Running works. And yet, the vast majority of people who take up running become quickly injured. Accordingly, they lose heart and stop running.

The landscape of what we have chosen to call disability changes rapidly, and for many reasons. Parents, educators, social service providers and others who work with the disabled (especially children) should be familiar with the scope of these changes and how they might affect the individuals with whom they work. Here are a few core principles that derive from our current understanding of disability:

The quality of an instructor’s presence has more impact on the learning environment than any other single factor. Love what you do, acknowledge the potentially profound role you play in a learner’s life. Get past the politics and the drudgery and the unpaid hours. Develop and bring into the classroom your sense of the sacred trust of learning. It does change the world.

There is a crossroads, and a gate, in all the old tales. On one side lies the known, the practiced, the familiar. And on the far side, unseen and unimagined, lies the Other: the one we left behind, who has been waiting all this time. That threshold is a holy place; it does not decay, nor can it be thwarted, nor can it be lost within the tangle of grooved and meandering ways. The crossroads remains, and is protected. The air is still, and warm. Drops of morning moisture lie upon the tips of slender grasses. A sound comes from the far side of the gate; the soft warbling, perhaps, of a stream in the near distance. You reach for that gate -- we all do. It might be opened with a small and gentle push.

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 precisely to meet the grasping hand:these qualities of wood embody the romance of the sea. But unlike our nautical forebears, who were intimately acquainted with the properties of spruce and cedar and teak and jarrah, many mariners of today are not familiar with the proper means of selecting woods for marine use. In this two-part series, we’ll explore a straightforward procedure for choosing, installing, and finishing wood. In this issue, we’ll begin on the boat, with the challenge of wood selection.

Among the materials available to the modern mariner, none is more versatile than epoxy. For gluing,repairing, reinforcing, finishing – even for molding mechanical parts – epoxy provides a unique solution. It’s the duct tape of the sea, only far better. Epoxy can enhance the quality and durability of your boat in innumerable ways, can replace and outperform many other traditional materials, and it’s easier to use than you might expect. But before we get to the details of why and how to use epoxy, we need first to know what it is.

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 miles of the open Pacific, piling up monstrous swells: twenty feet, then thirty, then higher. On the seventh day of the storm, with the east wind howling at sixty knots, the swells grew to an average of fifty feet. Every fifteen seconds a new behemoth — large as a five-story office building — shouldered its way into the stern.

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 sails slack.The men in the hold waited, unsure of what was happening. Dread spread among them. They did not speak the language of the crew, though they understood perfectly the gestures of the guns.

More than two dozen men climbed from the hold into the bright day. The glassy surface of the sea stretched to the horizon on one side, and on the other they saw their destination: hills rising from a rocky shore, a forest tinged with the sea’s blue, white-flecked mountains to the north. Golden Mountain.

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 have turned with unfailing habit for centuries, approaching it with an alchemical reverence that borders on mysticism, is that of wood finishing. Fine finishes – lustrous, highlighting the wood’s grain, inviting the hand to touch – have long been the pinnacle of wood craftsmanship. Some violin makers still preserve, even today, secret varnish formulas that have been passed down through many generations. The long history of secrecy and experimentation in wood finishing has led to its status as the most complex subject in woodworking.This makes sense; there are, after all, hundreds of ways to effectively finish wood. Depending on the intended effect, excellent results can be achieved with milk, crazy glue,the oil from walnuts, and many other surprising products. Faced with the overwhelming diversity of finishing products on the market today, many people working on boats surrender either to the marketing ploys of manufacturers or to the old habit of finishing everything with spar varnish. But wood finishing can be a joy, and if you follow a few simple guidelines, it can be easy as well.

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 history, wherever humans have possessed sufficient technology or population to deplete natural abundance, we have done so. In much of Central America, Australia, Europe and Africa, territory that has been void of trees for centuries was once cleared by people to make fire and build homes. According to one theory, the Sahara is the result of a giant, ancient clearcut. Today’s forestry dilemmas are simply the latest round in what has been a protracted engagement.

I prepare the altar in the quiet of early morning, before my day becomes cluttered with tasks and appointments and obligations. I lay aside my cup of ginger tea, adjust my posture on the polished walnut seat, and clear away the accumulated detritus of yesterday. With the heel of my hand I sweep dust from the base of the lamp. I reposition an errant cord and wipe a smudge from the screen. I reach forward, in the attitude of supplication and expectation shared by devotees the world over, and gently grasp the hand of the oracle.

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, in the Egyptian gallery of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, as I stand before the only remaining fragment of an ancient sculpture. The body has vanished, and most of the head is gone. What remains is a small artefact, about six inches high: an elegant mouth -- smiling, in repose -- and the beginning curve of a face, carved from yellow jasper. Between ragged fractures where the stone is sheared off -- one just above the top lip, the other below the chin -- the mouth has been sculpted with astonishing precision by the craft of a culture now strewn across the debris field of history. This statue, all that's left of the queen of a remote age, was fashioned in devotion and shattered by war, almost twenty-five centuries ago. And still, she smiles.