Speaker 1 (00:10):
In nursing school when i was was 19, I told my classmates, if there's ever another war and I'm single, I'll go. I started hearing on the radio about a place I'd never heard of. It's called Vietnam. The things they were describing sounded like we had soldiers there and that they were getting hurt. So I went to the army and they said, we'll train you to be an operating room nurse because that's what we need, and to top it off, I could go to college. they raise landed in Vietnam, it started immediately. We were beside the hobo woods where all the fighting was happening in 1967, the worst place you could ever be.

(00:54):
I played my ukulele a lot. Playing music was completely different from everything about the war. It was like I did it for my sanity. I worked 16 to 20 hours a day. There were constantly helicopters coming and bringing casualties, mass casualties pretty much all the time. There were times when I actually had to do surgery, standing up, handing instruments while the mortars were coming in. We really had no protection, and that was when I learned how strong I was because I had to just focus and do my job. It was just ordinary things, but it was not ordinary to me anymore. I had lived this intense experience for a full year and now I am back home, but it doesn't seem like home. I didn't feel like I belonged. I didn't know what to do with myself, so then I knew I'm not the same and nothing's the same. Music and singing. There's a vibration to it. They raise my vibrations for somebody like me or other veterans who've had these horrific experiences, we need to express and get it out of our bodies, and it's not so much the product or the thing we create that has meaning. It's the activity of doing it and getting it out.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Path. Art started working with veteran communities in a very intentional way in 2019.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Path Art is a nonprofit organizations that foster the restoration of individuals, groups, and society from the effects of trauma through art and community engagements.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
Path of Art has a relationships with many local veteran service organizations in addition to the local va.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Partnerships are very important to develop our program because they're the ones that refer the participants to us, but also they're the ones that tell us what their community needs. Every quarter we have eight-week classes, two hours each. We're offering painting, writing, photography, music.

Speaker 4 (03:13):
The veterans Choir always captures me. If you could synthesize comradery and brotherhood, sisterhood, that is it.

Speaker 5 (03:28):
Beautiful job. Excellent. My first duty station was Okinawa, Japan. It went out one night with other female marines, and that night I was drugged and raped and then left on the side of the road. In Okinawa, I lived with some of the most severe PTSD, not even knowing that that's what it was. I then had children. I got married. I tried to have a normal job, and not knowing that you have something like that is very difficult. To then try to feel normal visual art is what allowed me to then begin to kind of unravel some of that and share my story in a way where I was more in control. By being able to show through my artwork what I had been through in the hopes of inspiring other veterans.

(04:27):
This mask collection, it was a way to give a face to invisible wounds, but also share the story of the recovery. My ability to maintain my own self-care, to continue surfing, to continue therapy, to continue saying yes, I have challenges and barriers. It allows me to then stand in front of other veterans and be me and not feel like I have to put on a show that everything's fine. Some days things aren't, and that's okay. Today is about telling your story, whatever that means to you, whatever that looks like for you. Veterans, we are people of permission. That's something that we're taught from day one. We need permission to do things, and so I found that veterans sometimes need the permission of, is it okay if I do something that's on the darker end? The most important thing people often need to hear is that they are not alone.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
There is a lot of research happening right now on the impact of art, on health and wellbeing. Our theory of change says art provides you with a sense of agency. This is especially important for people who may not feel like they've had much agency over their lives.

Speaker 6 (05:47):
Everybody says, what does it take to be a soldier? We're willing to put our life on the line in defense of our country. That willingness is the true mark of a soldier because we always want to be of service. That's the greatest way for veterans to find the healing that they're looking for, and for me, my way of giving back is through storytelling that people can relate to and can find their own healing in. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I grew up in the projects. We were very poor. My mother was mentally ill, and she also had a traumatic brain injury. She was very violent. I joined the Army at 17 and got out of Detroit and away from my family. This was in 1990 and in October of that year, my first love committed suicide. An hour after I got off the phone with her, and that was devastating.

(06:46):
Ever since I can remember I was making up stories. they raise discovered writing, that was my thing. I was like, oh my gosh, I love this. I'm good at it. And to be able to write, you need to be able to feel, and that's the last thing I wanted to do. Almost 30 years without writing up until I became involved with Path with Art, I took this spoken word, poetry class path with art, had the Art for All Ball, and I was able to do my spoken word poem for that event, and it really showed me the power of my writing and how it could affect people, and it was then that I started calling myself a writer. Organizations like Path with Art are very valuable and needed in every community. We don't seem to encourage adults to play and do art. I feel like this should be mandatory. When a soldier gets out of the military, they should automatically be given an art class. There's already so many difficulties becoming a civilian that having art and having that way to express yourself, I think would really help a lot of veterans make the transition a little bit more smoothly.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
Many people say, I'm not an artist, but if you give them the space, the tools, something happened, they become exploring and expressing everything that they can sometimes express in words because of the trauma. We give veterans new titles,

Speaker 5 (08:12):
I call them artists. Every email they get from me. Good afternoon artists, good morning artists.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
I had an opportunity to paint in this art studio, and so I could do big arm movements. I wasn't trying to create anything I just wanted to express. It gave me a way to put that out, to put the feelings out. The feelings it had to get out.

Speaker 4 (08:35):
Everyone should be making some kind of art in their lives and appreciating someone else's.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
It kind of gives you this pathway for possibility and that reframes your narrative. Who you are.