It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
Humor has quite a lot to do with play . . . The Latin root of “humor” is “umor,” meaning liquid or fluid. Humor is something that flows [and therefore] resembles water itself . . . Another important part of play is a sense of wonder . . . Play offers the leeway to let images, thoughts, and ideas turn things upside down, inside out . . . Play is, I hold, an attitude, not only an activity. (Joan Erickson, “The Importance of Play in Adulthood,” 51-64)
Hasidic tales about in which individuals who felt lost, alone, or abandoned spiritually were able to regain hope and direction through personal guidance conveyed in a dream. Such guidance could be highly specific: a directive to travel to an unfamiliar locale and there wait for an epiphany to break stagnation and reenergize one’s soul. Or the advice could be broad and temporally open-ended.
“In my own notes, I had at first labeled this defense the ‘fear of one’s own greatness’ or the ‘evasion of one’s destiny’ or the ‘running away from one’s own ‘best talents.’ So often we run away from the responsibilities dictated (or rather suggested) by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried–in vain–to run away from his fate.” (Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 37)
[A]s adults, we likewise forged close friendships with those committed to helping new generations acquire the knowledge, skills, and wisdom necessary for building a better world. In contemporary psychology, this trait is called generativity, first identified by the Danish-Jewish psychologist Erik Erikson in the early 1950s.
Developed through his close association with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1940s to 1950s, Jung suggested that in such occurrences [synchronicities], the very forces of time and space lose their boundaries or become relativistic–that is, causality disappears.
Forming Your Kvittel
Take a sheet of paper and write the names of the following persons if applicable–and they are alive:
Your mother Your father Each grandparent Your spouse (or current spouse if previously married) Each of your children Each of your grandchildren Each of your siblings Each of your closest friends–romantic or otherwise Each extended family member to whom you feel close (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) Yourself
Now next to each name, write one sentence on what this person currently needs the most–in your opinion. The need can be material (financial, occupational), emotional-social, health-physical, or spiritual. . . .
From its earliest days, America served as an arena for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that eventually swept the globe. Esoteric philosophies and personas – from Freemasonry to Spiritualism, from Madame H. P. Blavatsky to Edgar Cayce – dramatically altered the nation’s culture, politics, and religion. Yet the mystical roots of our identity are often ignored or overlooked.
Distilled Spirits blends the stories of three men – Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson – who transformed the twentieth century landscape of spirituality. Huxley, author of Brave New World, ignited a generation that sought enlightenment through psychedelic drugs. Heard, an Anglo-Irish mystic, journeyed to California with Huxley to lay the foundations for the New Age and human potential movements. Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, joined forces with Huxley and Heard to see if LSD could be used to help diehard drunks.
While quantum mechanics, relativity, non-Euclidean geometries, non-Aristotelian logic, and General Semantics have revolutionized our view of the world, the habits of everyday thought remain deeply rooted in the thought patterns and linguistic conventions of the Middle Ages. Through an introduction to E-Prime (English without use of the verb “to be”), the Eight Circuits of the Brain Model, and the labyrinth of Quantum Mechanics’ various views of reality, Quantum Psychology can help your brain improve your perception of yourself and the world.
Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks of character and conduct, comporting themselves in a manner painfully inferior to what you know them to be capable of.
What to do?
The problem of whether and how people change is the eternal problem of being alive. Changing our own ways of being is difficult enough, prey enough to paradox and peril; changing another is nigh impossible and, if attempted harshly or self-righteously, dangerous to both parties. But if an honorable and loving relationship between two people is rooted in “refining the truths they can tell each other,” then holding up a mirror for course-correction is an act of love. And though this may be the tenderest and most enduring gift we can give one another, given the wrong way the gift can feel like a grenade against which the other person mounts defenses so steely the relationship itself can shatter in the collision.
How to ensure that our feedback falls on receptive ears is what the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) explores in a portion of his classic Hakagure (public library) — the posthumously published collection of his teachings, which also gave us his immortal guide to living fully by dying every day.
Art by Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Considering the necessity of this feedback loop, the urgency with which we need each other in it, he writes:
We cannot easily correct our defects and weak points as they are dyed deeply within us… To give a person one’s opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult.
To discover the good and bad points of a person is an easy thing, and to give an opinion concerning them is easy, too. For the most part, people think that they are being kind by saying the things that others find distasteful or difficult to say. But if it is not received well… [it] is completely worthless.
Observing that shaming is an especially ineffectual instrument of change, he offers a tactical field guide to fertile feedback:
To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood. Judge the occasion, and determine whether it is better by letter or at the time of leave-taking. Praise their good qualities and use every device to encourage them, perhaps by talking about your faults in a way that allows them to reflect on their own. Have them receive this the way a thirsty person takes to water, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults.
Author Dawson Church applies the insights of the new field of Epigenetics (epi=above, i.e. control above the level of the gene) to healing. Citing hundreds of scientific studies, he shows how beliefs and emotions can trigger the expression of DNA strands. He focuses on a class of genes called Immediate Early Genes or IEGs. These genes turn on within a few seconds of a stimulus. They can be triggered by thoughts or emotions (“I loved that unexpected gift of roses Bill gave me” or “I’m so mad about what Uncle John said at the Christmas party”). Many IEGs are regulatory genes turn on other genes that affect specific aspects of our immune system, such as the production of white blood cells that destroy attacking bacteria and viruses. Epigenetics thus influences our health every day. He coins the new term “Epigenetic Medicine” to describe healing techniques with epigenetic effects. He also summarizes the science behind the infant fields of Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine, both of which offer promising epigenetic medical therapies, and describes a few of the thousands of powerful personal breakthroughs that are being achieved by therapists, doctors and lay people praticing these techniques. The Genie in Your Genes shows that there is a sound theoretical framework, based on credible experiments, for understanding these astonishing results, and predicts that the insights of Epigenetic Medicine will dramatically advance the fields of both medicine and psychology in the coming decade. Best of all, The Genie in Your Genes demonstrates that, by taking control of our consciousness and using it to influence our genetic expression, we can sometimes bypass years of therapy, as well as harmful drugs and invasive surgeries, to, in effect, do continuous genetic engineering on our own bodies. This can produce both immediate relief from long-standing anxieties and neuroses, as well as “miraculous” healing of persistent physical conditions, especially autoimmune diseases. Among a new crop of books that chart the way to a positive health future, The Genie in Your Genes stands out as a solidly grounded and exciting pointer to the future possibilities of a medicine that links soul to body and mind.
“Perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life.”
–William Law
(Image from Amazon.com)
[H]ow significant it is that in the Indo-European languages . . . the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis-gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel--for to doubt is to be double-minded. . . . Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division–a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.
“When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.'”
“For my part, I think the chief reason which prompted the invisible God to become visible in the flesh and to hold converse with men was to lead carnal men, who are only able to love carnally, to the healthful love of his flesh, and afterwards, little by little, to spiritual love.” –St. Bernard
“Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s palace; and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride fo a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.
“You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
“Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you can never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all; you never enjoy the world.
“Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house; till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it; and more rejoice in the palace of your glory than if it had been made today morning.
“Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it that you had rather suffer the flames of hell than willingly be guilty of their error.” –Thomas Traherne
“Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual. In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours.” –Eckhart
“Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.” –William Law
Love is a mode of knowledge.
[M]an’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.
“The sect of lovers is distinct from all others; Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own.” –Jalal-uddin Rumi
“Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself.” –St. Augustine
“Our kingdom go” is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of “Thy kingdom come.”
“The rout and destruction of the passions, while a good, is not the ultimate good; the discovery of Wisdom is the surpassing good. When this is found, all the people will sing.” –Philo
It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is “more abundant” than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude [happiness].
With specific and easily understandable exercises and epiphanies, The Wizard of Us harkens to the classic tale and defines the hero’s journey through the skills and internal qualities that live within each of us. If you are seeking a creative exploration of self-understanding, realization, and improvement you will find a connection to the larger world story as you explore Oz like never before.
Robert Thurman, the preeminent scholar and interpreter of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy for the modern world, leads us on a joyful exploration into the nature of reality through Buddha’s threefold curriculum of “super-education.” “Buddha had to be an educator, rather than a prophet or religion founder, since he had achieved his goal of exact and complete understanding of reality by using reason, experiments to open his own mind, and vision to do so,” Thurman writes.
Angels at My Fingertips takes us back to the territory that made Angels in My Hair a million selling, international bestseller. Stories of Lorna’s early life in rural Ireland, of how angels helped and guided her through traumatic events, lead to a detailed description of what angels are like, the different types of angels, how they behave in interact with God and other angels as well as human beings, and their role during our lives and after death.
Consciousness Came First is a unique, panoramic and powerful book bridging the gulf between contemporary science and the philosophy of the ages. Aimed at the general rather than the specialist academic reader, it is essential reading for all those attempting to unravel the mysteries of life in the modern age.
Conservatives often defend policies that feel hard-hearted. Why? Christopher Armitage and D. Carl Brown argue the root problem is a measurable empathy gap, not mere ideology.
Their concise analysis shows how this gap drives positions on poverty, immigration, pollution, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ equality, hurting millions while claiming virtue.
Grounded in psychology and real-world data, this book reframes the culture war and offers a path toward compassion-led politics.
Christopher Armitage is an Air Force veteran and researcher in psychology, law enforcement, and public policy.
D. Carl Brown is a clinical psychologist who studies empathy and personality in political behavior.
In “American Trickster,” Ru Marshall takes on the epic story of Carlos Castaneda.
In order to burnish his mysterious image, Carlos Castaneda lived the reclusive life of a nonpublic intellectual. Credit…Eddie Adams/Eddie Adams Photographic Archives, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin
By Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen is the author of nine books, including “The Breakup,” a forthcoming novel.
Published July 4, 2026 Updated July 7, 2026
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AMERICAN TRICKSTER: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, by Ru Marshall
Does anyone under 50 know who Carlos Castaneda was? Around 1970, this anthropologist’s books of psychedelic adventures in Mexico with an Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan turned him into one of the world’s most widely read writers. Today, he’s a little-remembered artifact. So why a serious biography by the writer and artist Ru Marshall?
Castaneda had a wide-ranging cultural influence. And he was a dark, fascinating character, a Peruvian transplant to California who rebranded himself in the 1980s as a wizard, distilling his respectable mass popularity into a small, lucrative cult. In Marshall’s hands, “American Trickster” is smart, thoughtful — and all too timely.
“Let me unequivocally get this out of the way,” Marshall stipulates early on. “It was all a hoax, a trick.” The books were fiction, Don Juan an invention. And with them Castaneda godfathered a facts-don’t-matter alternate-reality paradigm shift still transforming our culture.
Castaneda was 42 and on hiatus from a Ph.D. program in 1968 when “The Teachings of Don Juan” was published. In a foreword, his mentor, the chair of the anthropology department at U.C.L.A, praised his protégé for leading readers into “an entirely different order of reality.”
In a key scene, Castaneda smokes peyote in Mexico and apparently turns into a crow. Carlos, Marshall writes, relinquishes “his Western worldview and its limiting rationalism.” The book was rapturously reviewed as brilliant and groundbreaking, and found its way into millions of dorm rooms and backpacks.
Two more books were quickly written. “One can’t exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done,” an editor at The New York Times Book Review wrote of the second. For the third, “Journey to Ixtlan,” the same editor allegedly commissioned a review from a specialist in Native religions, but killed it (too negative) and published a young anthropologist’s rave instead. It was on the nonfiction best-seller list for six months.
Castaneda had hit the pocket of the zeitgeist wave, what Marshall calls “a mass desire to stick it to the Man.” Castaneda’s luck was also boosted by the popularity of Latin American magical realism and the factually-casual New Journalism.
Marshall writes that Castaneda, raised in a well-to-do family, was a two-faced fabulist who grew into a seductive con man. He hung with hipster intellectuals, soaking up Nietzsche and Sartre, whose ideas he mixed with local ghost stories — and voilà, the teachings of Don Juan. “He lied because he loved to,” Marshall writes. “Lying was for him an art” for this “wonderful, fantastic, fabulous liar.”
In the 1950s he arrived in California, the global headquarters of the fantasy-industrial complex. Castaneda studied anthropology, a field at the leading edge of a new don’t-judge cultural relativism seeping through the academy.
Unlike his contemporary Timothy Leary, whose fame derived from getting fired from Harvard, Castaneda depended on his university’s imprimatur. In fact, he didn’t really do drugs, hated rock ‘n’ roll, dressed conservatively. He loathed his later books’ psychedelic covers, which he deemed “completely inappropriate for a work of serious anthropology.”
In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates publicly questioned Castaneda’s credibility. “I realize that everyone accepts them as anthropological studies,” she wrote, but she doubted that “these books are nonfiction.”
Like other countercultural literary heroes, Castaneda was a nonpublic figure, reinforcing his aura of mystery and gravitas. But in 1973, he made a large exception, agreeing to an interview for a Time magazine cover story — one that concluded Castaneda was a fantasist and Don Juan very probably imaginary. “I have to change my whole format,” he told the interviewer. “Now I am going to be a sorcerer.”
Soon he was persona non grata in academia and getting negative reviews. His new books stopped selling. The discourse moved on.
But thousands of devotees paid handsomely to attend his workshops, which quickly turned cultlike. Castaneda called his closest acolytes, mostly women, “winds,” “witches,” “sorcerers,” “Blue Scouts,” “Orange Scouts,” “cyclic beings.” They legally changed their names to be more “sorceric.” Only he could cut female adherents’ hair, and he told them “his semen’s magic properties” would “transmit shamanic knowledge.” In order to become a true sorcerer, he told two followers, he “had to plunge a dagger into a newborn infant’s heart” and eat it. “I have sold my soul to the Devil,” he explained.
One leading male disciple was, improbably, the satirist Bruce Wagner. In 1998, when he learned Castaneda had died, Wagner phoned a fellow follower and joked, “Is it black Nike time yet?” — a reference to the recent mass suicide at the unrelated Heaven’s Gate cult in Southern California. In fact, after Castaneda’s death, five women from the group went missing and never resurfaced.
Marshall himself was a teenage Castaneda fan, and spent 20 years researching and writing “American Trickster.” It’s definitive, exhaustive — sometimes to a fault. We learn the names and pseudonyms of dozens of minor figures in Castaneda’s life, inconsequential dates, endless details of banal encounters; we go down too many digressive, speculative historical and philosophical rabbit holes.
Still, with an American president’s adherents so cultlike (and even pro-psychedelics!), “American Trickster” is illuminating and relevant: We can all use insight into sociopathic selfishness and the pursuit of power for its own sake.
Great American charlatans tend to be extravagant fabricators who believe some or much of their own creation. “I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history,” Mormonism’s creator Joseph Smith said. “If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself.”
In the 1990s, Castaneda “laughingly” told followers that psychologists would consider his insistence he saw dead sorcerers’ ghosts a delusion, paranoid schizophrenia — because shrinks are “the ghosts’ puppets.”
Did the people around Castaneda buy his fantasies? His wife “believed him and didn’t,” writes Marshall. “Did Carlos believe he’d sold his soul? Or was he trying to “terrify” an acolyte, “or both?” With tricksters you never know for sure.
AMERICAN TRICKSTER: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda | By Ru Marshall | OR Books | 672 pp. | $29.95
A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2026, Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fraud Alert
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride — the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo’s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph — the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
Nick and Frida. (Catalina Island Museum)
She was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first great art, Frida’s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them Xóchitl — “flower” in the indigenous Náhuatl language — and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
Frida Kahlo: Flower of Life, 1938-1943
In a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to André Breton and his coterie (“you have no idea what kind of bitches these people are”) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “kid” despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
He did.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
When I received your letter, few days ago, I didn’t know what to do. I must tell you that I couldn’t help weeping. I felt that something was in my throat, just as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don’t know yet if I was sad, jealous or angry, but the sensation I felt was in first place of a great despair. I have read your letter many times, too many, I think, and now I realize things that I couldn’t see at first. Now, I understand everything perfectly clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you with my best words, that you deserve in life the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts… No matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for myself, the same Nick I met one morning in New York in 18th E. 48th St.
And then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
I want to ask from you a great favour, please, send by mail the little cushion, I don’t want anybody else to have it. I promise to make another one for you, but I want that one you have now on the couch downstairs, near the window… Take down the photo of myself which was on the fireplace, and put it in Mam’s room in the shop, I’m sure she still likes me as much as she did before. Besides, it is not so nice for the other lady to see my portrait in your house. I wish I could tell you many many things but I think it is no use to bother you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes.
[…]
About my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.
As she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
I have nothing to say about what I felt. I hope you will be happy, very happy… Thanks for the magnificent photo, again and again. Thanks for your last letter, and for all the treasures you gave me.
Love,
Frida
Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray (Brooklyn Museum)
By that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida’s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with “the worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,” she wrote to Nick:
I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering… I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I do, but of course it will be different, I hope, in a few months.
Still addressing him as “darling” and “baby,” she adds:
Thanks Nickolasito for all your kindness, for the dreams about me, for your sweet thoughts, for everything. Please forgive me for not writing as soon as I received your letters, but let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live thru it… Don’t forget me and be a good boy.
I love you,
Frida
He never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love — continuing to desire the other’s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end.
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
We cannot easily correct our defects and weak points as they are dyed deeply within us… To give a person one’s opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult.
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.