back in touch

notes on almond blossoms, beauty saving the world and learning to stay

Dear reader,

I am writing to you from our new studio space in our trullo home in Puglia. It’s an overcast day and the white stone walls inside are reflecting the gentle even light coming through the door. Our two new kittens Ayla and Lumi are playing with a dry leaf on the floor, hunting it and jumping around as if it was a mouse.

Just outside there is an almond tree, the flowers of which are blossoming day by day in their full bloom. I’ve still found some almonds from the last harvest in hard shells and they were some of the juiciest and most delicious almonds I’ve ever had.

I thought initially these were cherry blossom trees, and apparently the flowering is eerily similar, although distinctive. Almond blossoms are usually white to pale pink with five petals, and you often see them on bare branches because they can open before leaves fully emerge.

The first flowers appeared about a week or two ago, roughly beginning of February. It made me reflect on how close we are to spring — in the Mediterranean south, winter can feel like a spring sometimes as some flowers keep blossoming throughout.

I’m still getting to know the plants growing on our land. How they grow through seasons. What their potential medicinal qualities are. It’s just one of the ways for me to get back in touch.

I say “in touch” without any object because in it I intend a multitude of meanings. And I don’t want to say “nature” because that propagates the idea that it’s something separate, an object, an abstraction.

It’s been a while since I last wrote here. I’ve started this letter at least five or six times over the past month — different drafts, different angles, different versions of what I wanted to say. But also many times when nothing came through at all.

I miss writing, though. As I say it I feel a kind of shrivel in my spine, goosebumps on my back. That to me is usually a sign of resonance. My body’s way of saying that feels true.

I’ve been spending less and less time creating online. I’ve been enjoying getting busy with my hands instead. Doing physical things. Running cables through the wall. Cooking slowly. Cracking open almonds. I’ve been experimenting with documenting my slower pace of life here in a cinematic way, you can watch the latest episodes here:

Sometimes creating is hard. Not the doing of it — the knowing what to create. For two years I built something I’m proud of. A course, a community, a language around guidance and business that helped real people. I still believe in it. It still works. But my hands started wanting to do something else.

They wanted to hold a camera. They wanted to write sentences that don’t convert anyone to anything. They wanted to get dirty in the garden. They wanted to touch the actual world instead of optimizing a digital representation of it.

So I’ve been following that. Quietly, without announcement. Picking up the camera in the golden hour and photographing curtains, shadows on walls, my own hands reaching through light toward something I can’t quite name. I printed a few of the images. They’re sitting on the table right now.

I’m developing a new body of work with a new direction. Something about the experience of never quite belonging — arriving in places and loving them while knowing there’s always glass between you and them. Silhouettes in doorways. Hands on foreign stone. Shadows that travel lighter than the person who casts them. I’ve never lived anywhere longer than seven years. I’m still getting to know the plants on my land.

Sometimes I feel incredible sadness for what I perceive to be happening in the world. The influence of media, of course, which tends to amplify the dramatic and disturbing. But everything we see out there exists in us too. Everything I see out there exists in me too.

And somehow — maybe from the helplessness of not being able to change things at the systemic level, or by sheer nature of human meaning-seeking — I always come back to art.

“Мир спасёт красота,” wrote Dostoevsky through his character in The Idiot. The world will be saved by beauty. Not shallow beauty or pretty landscapes. Beauty as in radiant goodness — compassion, humility, the kind of love that interrupts violence and ego. Art that reveals truth can crack the armor, make someone feel again.

I don’t know if my photographs can do that. But I’d rather spend my days trying than engineering another carousel about a pain point.

Some days I sit with my camera and feel like the most alive version of myself. Other days I feel like I’m playing dress-up as the person I want to be. I think both of those are probably true. Maybe that’s what it means to be in the middle of becoming something.

I’m going to write here more often. But differently. Less “here’s what I learned” and more “here’s what I noticed.” Less teaching, more touching — the actual textures of a life being built slowly, in a borrowed room, in a country that isn’t mine, with light that makes everything look like a memory before it’s finished happening.

You might love it. You might unsubscribe. Both feel honest.

I’m still here. The 3-hour guidance business course is still available — it works, people get results, I believe in the method. My guidance business is what allowed me to create the time and resources to focus on my art without the financial pressure. I’m not burning it down. I’m just not building my identity around it anymore.

If you’re out there making something — photographs, music, a garden, a life that doesn’t fit a template — I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this. Tell me what you’re making. Tell me about the light where you live.

I’ll be here. Between the olive trees and the almond blossoms.

Getting back in touch.

Nik Huno