"I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic...

...And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prsim of color across the sky-- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

--Donna Tart, The Goldfinch

I finally read this brick of literature and it was really quite good.

“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” 
― Frida Kahlo

Creating art from pain, shaping stories from torn flesh and broken bones. Healing is progress not towards normalcy, as my health (physical and mental) will never be normal (whose is?). Healing is progression to authenticity, to singing aloud, to creating and adding and becoming part of the chiaroscurro of pain and joy to the world. When pain occurs, our bodies are mindfully alive-- mindful to death. Respecting death with all of life's wonder.
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Telling one's story is not narcissism; it is birth and truth. To tell a story that does not spring from the heart, the mud, is cliche (big media) and cliche is not death, it is static. 

by a real Sex Worker,
Antonia Crane. 
Love her long and love her short.