July 2022 - Season Update
LETTER FROM JAY LAPPE, PROGRAM MANAGER
The first month of the 2022 Heroes and Horses Program has just been completed.
The men who are participating this year are some of the most powerful and dedicated that I have met in my life. In their journey through this program, we have seen tremendous growth in each of them. All, affected by their own personal traumas, have made significant strides towards taking back control of their narrative.
To these men, up until now, they have been watching their story be told by somebody else and have all responded to the call to take up the pen and begin writing their own. They have not shirked the work nor avoided the struggle but instead have taken up the hero's call to find their purpose and strive every day to live it. The ritual demands it.
I am tremendously proud of the work we are doing for the veteran's community and for these men on our ranch. It has been a unique honor to have met these men and been allowed to accompany them in this process. We have seen them bend but never break; stumble but never fall; doubt but never quit. We have watched while joy overpowered sorrow and hope replaced guilt and shame. We have been witness to the realization that trauma, death, and pain cannot overcome love- love of self and love of others.
While their service to our country was honorable, what they do next will engulf the world around them. The everyday struggle through the mental, physical, and spiritual tasks is a daunting and sometimes overwhelming task- in the program and in life- but they persist together in the most difficult conditions. They must persist because the cost of failure is too high. The dignity of the human experience is too valuable to be bartered away without a fight.
Every day they fight in the heat, the cold, and the silence; through the successes and the failures. Together, side by side, they dig graves for all the unnecessary that dies in them. They will leave those things in unmarked graves in the mountains.
-Jay Lappe
