Lori Walsh: Sanford Arts has been helping people through the tension and stress of medical crises for years. How can those principles be applied now in your own home during the isolation and tension of a pandemic? Jessie Park is the program coordinator of the Sanford Arts program and she's joining us today on the phone. Hey Jessie, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Jessie Park: Good morning, Lori.
Lori Walsh: How are things at the hospital? Because everybody is thinking about healthcare providers and Sanford Arts is also thinking about supporting the people who come to work every day. Give us a little update on how things are going in that effort to say thank you to many of these healthcare providers.
Jessie Park: Okay, so the coolest things that are happening at Sanford Arts is just that, is the recognition of how healing or beneficial the arts can be in a time like this. And so we're doing a number of different things that are allowing people, some of the pillars of our work that have always been something like giving a platform for witnessing what people are going through and also for people to voice what they're going through and then relieving stress.
So some of the things we're doing are a hitching on the back of the quickly-found symbol that, the national symbol for everyone getting together, which is the heart. So we're allowing people to create hearts. A lot of people, independently of our program, are putting the hearts in the windows. People are writing messages on the heart. And that's some of the things we're going to be doing pretty soon is writing messages to each other. So when you talk about the stress of the providers and now even the patients that can't have their visitors, we're thinking about programs where they can talk to each other or provide a forum for them to support each other, give thanks, things like that.
Lori Walsh: For people who aren't familiar with the work that Sanford Arts does on a daily basis, this is a really natural extension for you. You have that infrastructure already built, although certainly challenged and stretched, like many things are right now. But tell us, on a regular day two months ago, six months ago, what kind of work was Sanford Arts doing?
Jessie Park: Okay. So the mission of Sanford Arts is to piggy back on the mission of Sanford, which is health and healing. And the way that we do it is through the arts. We work in any area of the hospital. The key ideas that we have are, of course, there's going to be stress. There's going to be boredom and there's going to be loneliness. So we work with anybody. Our projects always stress the idea that when you are stressed out or when you even come to hospital, you're giving up the sense of your control. And so what we do is we capitalize on doing projects that help to establish a sense of control. And that's very applicable to what's going on right now. A lot of people feel that they're not in control of what's going on or the control that they used to have or the freedom that they used to have is not there.
So those are the things that we do on a daily basis. A lot of people are bored. They might be bored primarily in the cancer center. Or in the dialysis center they have to sit there for hours on end and maybe not even be able to move very much, and the boredom is really high. So bringing in projects that help relieve the boredom and highlighting the idea that it'll relieve the boredom is there. And establishing a sense of community is very important to us and we do community projects very frequently where numbers of people contribute to the same project. And this is also reminiscent of what's going on with the hearts, that and you can do a world of hearts and feel connected to everybody else who's doing that. And in that sense there is a community there too.
And then one of the final things that we talk about is a platform for witnessing and storytelling. And it's very powerful for a lot of these people under these life-threatening, body-altering situations to be able to have a platform where they tell their story and then their story is witnessed by other people in the same situation or other people. And that's also a very therapeutic healing type of activity or thought process. That's what we do on a daily basis, no matter what the situation.
Lori Walsh: Let's talk a little bit about this platform for witnessing because you're seeing this happen organically on social media, in people's windows when you drive by, when you see ... I know the house across the street from mine has a huge display of hearts and thank yous for healthcare workers. When you watch the power of this witnessing in a healthcare setting, now you're really seeing it community-wide and even nation-wide. How are you watching that unfold even when nobody's coordinating it? It's just happening on its own. Speak to that if you would, please.
Jessie Park: Right. And so our part about witnessing, we were educated on it in a storytelling educational bit called The Hero's Journey. And what it does is it just highlights the struggle. And you can talk about a struggle in loads of different severities or loads of different intensities, but the struggle, you go through the process of the building up, then struggling, then coming back, then telling the story and then moving on from there.
And what, I think, with our situation and what we have is that people are always willing to, especially Midwesterners, we always talk about this in the program, that people want to help each other. And in a way, the witnessing, you understand witnessing is an idea or an aspect of helping people. And witnessing becomes such a powerful tool. And we have that all over when we want to say thank you, when we want to do an aspect of the struggle or an aspect of what's painful, or even going through something together. I think when you witness that together, it's both a very [inaudible 00:07:04] gives people, again, a sense of control, understanding that they can get through it together. And we've heard that all over, just that's been the tagline that everyone is using, that where you can to do it together.
Lori Walsh: Is there a way to witness with each other well? You have worked and your artists have worked with people who are very ill, some of whom know they're not going to get better, some who are using this as a time to refocus and retool their lives when they are better. A lot of people in your work are just living in that moment. Talk about how we can do that well for each other, especially when there's so much collective anxiety.
Jessie Park: I think some of the least labor-intensive witnessing ways are a lot of times people want to witness or hear something and they want to provide answers or just to be better, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that when you witness, the way that I was taught and a way that allows a person to really just feel heard is just that. You're just observing. You're understanding. You're hearing and then without providing direction or the solution in your mind or further steps of how to get better or what your opinion is. Just listening to what they're saying, just observe what they've created. And I think when a lot of people, when they want to give feedback, then just own your feedback. And I that in that way, you're going to have people, just being heard is healing in itself or just being witnessed is healing in and of itself.
Lori Walsh: Yeah. Let's talk about some of the projects, because I follow you on social media and there are tutorials that you're offering. These are things that, one of the barriers people face is, I think, that, "I'm not an artist. I might create something that is bad, that is ugly to look at and I'm embarrassed to try it." But the projects that you put forth on social media are designed for step-by-step and designed for people who don't necessarily have familiarity with materials or art concepts. Tell us a little bit about some of what you put out in the world that people can connect with and do at home.
Jessie Park: Yeah, so the main focus of our program is always that we need to make our activities accessible in any way, whether it's a person that has limited use of their hands or in it's a technique-driven, skillful-driven activity. And the reason that we put the tutorials up is, very quickly when it really started to be a daily, minute-to-minute conversation in South Dakota, we did not know if we were going to be deemed essential or people were going to even request our services anymore. And thinking that we might not be working with patients quickly, we wanted to make those tutorials so that people could connect. People could find ways to be creative and then bringing that, the creative ... The creativity in doing new things helps with flexibility. And so we wanted to make sure that we could still provide those things.
The reason why we want to make things accessible is so that people feel encouraged to do them. But the main thing about our program and really about any art activity is that the barrier is always the person's made-up issue that they're not an artist, they're not going to create something aesthetically pleasing. But really what our focus is that in creating it, in creating it with somebody else or with the program, then it's actually the process of their creativity that is the honest part of the activity. And then whenever you create is just the symbol of the memory of the time that you had that fun. So the idea that it needs to be aesthetically pleasing or it needs to be sale worthy in some gallery is not there and we stress that very frequently.
Lori Walsh: Yeah. So many people, and I'm watching some of these, I'm totally going to make the pop-up book this weekend. That's on my list of ... Because the supplies are already things that I have in my house. I have paper. I can do this at home. I don't have to go source new art supplies. It's soothing just to watch the tutorial, as well. Talk a little bit about music, because some of your artists and residents have been musicians who come and help people do everything from writing their own song to learning a little something on the guitar, maybe. How do you think at home, in our current isolation and stress that we're living under, we could employ some of the techniques that you've seen your artists and residents do musically that might be of use?
Jessie Park: So our musicians, when they come to residents, they always have these amazing stories about reviving people's maybe dormant banjo-playing days or guitar-playing days, et cetera. And I think that that's one thing that is definitely possible at home. If anybody still has their instrument and they haven't picked it up for a while, just picking it up and getting their fingers back into the strings or getting their lips back in shape to play the trumpet or the French horn, those are the things that, again, when you're practicing and you're relearning all those skills, those are very self-sufficient self-efficacy-building skills. When you get back into it, you're like, "Well, I didn't sit around. I relearned the trumpet and/or I relearned the banjo."
When our artists play and they work with other individuals, it's the individual is the one who is the most excited about it and really drives the activity. And so what we have is, you just have the skills and the ability to assist that person build on whatever they want to build and really, it ends up being the motivation of those individuals.
Lori Walsh: What sort of stories can you tell us about times when, because I want to encourage people to try, to take a step in that direction and make an effort. You have seen patients who have come through the cancer center, for example, and really had moments of insight and transformation. And for people who are listening, this is a program that I did at one point. I was an artist in residence at the cancer center. And as a writer sitting there with my typewriter and helping people write poetry with magnetic poetry in the lobby, the stories that would come out of those people I will never, ever forget. And so you are in this all the time. Tell me some of those stories that have meaning for you still and that resonate for people who are willing to take that step into process and insight.
Jessie Park: The stories that we have are never ending. Almost every single time, a person approaches our table or we ask somebody to participate with us, very frequently people will say, "I'm not going to, because I'm not an artist." And every single time we get them to participate with us, whether or not they say, "Well, I just have loads of time. Why not," or, "This looks cool enough or easy enough. Why not," they always come away saying, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that." Or, "Wow, that really changed my day."
We had an end-of-life patient on 2000 and the family was up visiting him. And we were just in the Atrium of 2000. And his wife had mentioned that his mother had always called her Hard-hearted Hannah. And so what we thought of is making a heart out of clay and then putting his fingerprint into the clay. And then you bake it and then you have this heart of clay that has the fingerprint in it. So we did that for her and then as soon as we did that, all of the family members wanted one. So we ended up making, I don't know, a bunch. I can't remember the number. It was long ago, but we made a bunch of hearts with his fingerprint in it. And then when he passed away, they talked about that at the funeral.
There's people that will participate with us and tell us that working with the arts in such a time of stress is like stepping off the roller coaster. And it's so gratifying to hear people tell us those stories where we're giving them a moment of calm in all of the stress that potentially comes with coming into the hospital. There are people that worked with us for months on end because for whatever reason those people will, when we come in the door, they squint their eyes and they say, "Well, I'm kind of tired. I don't know if I want to ... I don't know who you are. Who are you?"And then we say, "We're the arts team."
And then they wake right up and say, "Well, I didn't know if you were a doctor. I didn't really want to talk to anybody else." And they do art with us.
Lori Walsh: Pull up a chair. Jessie Park, thank you so much. You're doing great work. It sounds pretty essential to me.
Jessie Park: Yeah, thanks.