Dear world, with love

Drafts of sunshine used to fall across my stationery in a ritual that has since been scrubbed from my daily life. We have traded the slow and deliberate labor of the pen for the hollow speed of automation. Looking at the horrors that confront us today, the shattered lives of children in Gaza and south Lebanon, the turmoil in Iran, and the brazen political circus here at home that insults our collective intelligence, I wonder if our humanity was lost in the transition.

Maybe the extinction of reading and writing has stripped us of the capacity for empathy. Artificial intelligence and the takeover of the mechanical have created a world where we no longer have to feel the weight of our words. A letter has weight. It has the palpable evidence of a heartbeat.

In February, I received a parcel from Spain that felt like a protest against this digital void. It was a letter from Joan Punyet Miró, grandson of the legendary Catalan surrealist after whom he was named. It consisted of 13 pages of handcrafted paper replete with sketches and ink splatters. To receive such an object in 2026 is to be reminded of what we have sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Even in prose, Punyet articulated his thoughts in the language of poetry. This is a language that requires the reader to slow down and breathe, acknowledging the soul on the other side of the page.

This art was already being dismissed as snail mail by the early 1990s. Efficiency was becoming the new god. Letter-writing was considered a dying practice, pushed aside by the advent of faxes and the rising volume of long-distance calls. It was 1991 when Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine was published. I was still a decade away from signing up for Yahoo, yet the world was already mourning the tactile. That book, with its removable letters and postcards, was a physical reminder of what we were losing to the ether.

A friend and I swore then never to let the practice die. We began a correspondence across the Pacific, between Manila and Los Angeles. It was a dialogue of ink that lasted for years. We would wait weeks for a reply. In that waiting, there was a form of diplomacy. There was a requirement to hold the other person in your mind for the duration of the journey. We anchored ourselves in a way no digital ping ever could.

My mentor, the late F. Sionil Jose, who also wrote for this paper, understood this permanence. He never stopped sending me his thoughts by hand. Sometimes he would utilize the post. Other times he would bridge the gap between eras by taking a photo of his handwritten page and sending it via email. Even in a digital format, the script was a cardiogram of his mind. It was an unrepeatable trace of his hand, a defiance of the keyboard and its uniform, soulless output.

Punyet’s letter is triggered by that same spirit. I met him last year during his first trip to the Philippines. He told me then that he felt happy in Manila, impressed by a people who welcomed him warmly, despite their painful history with the conquistadores. “You’ve made me feel that way,” he wrote. That initial meeting has now bloomed into a dialogue that exists outside of the frantic cadence of the present.

Of the poem he shared with me, this fragment feels particularly sharp, a series of lines that seem to vibrate on the handcrafted paper.

“Like a bird
sent to hell,
with a bird’s voice
to my daily gaze.
Morning the sky,
touched by the sun
hit by lightning,
I rest in a
leafless tree...”

His script bears all the tangible evidence of an artist’s hand, a meditation on art and color and his personal quest, an exploration of existential questions that cannot be answered by an algorithm.

“If Mondrian strove for order, Rothko for emotion, Klein for intensity, and Newman for transcendence, I am looking for nirvana in the spiritual holiness of every color,” he confessed.

Color for Punyet is a living thing. “You scratch the surface... you’ll find beneath it a living canvas, woven of love, with the power to heal,” he explained. Poetry is the pillar of his art, a force that encompasses his painting, his writing, his music.

“All truth remains hidden behind this enigmatic word, poetry,” he wrote. “There is always poetry, that rare power so full of mystery that always opens new windows in your shadowy subconscious.”

I will treasure this letter like a painting by Dalí or Picasso, those giants who were contemporaries of his grandfather. Punyet carries that formidable legacy as a living conversation. He is back in Manila now, preparing for “Oneness,” his new exhibition to be unveiled at Léon Gallery International on May 28.

His debut in Manila was defined by blue, but this return is different. While his previous work explored memory and the atmosphere of his grandfather’s studio through a monochrome visual language, “Oneness” expands into a meditation on unity. His practice, having evolved through sculpture, performance, and painting, is a deeply physical process. Often using his hands and body rather than conventional brushes, he allows movement, intuition, and inner emotion to guide the surface.

This exhibition is an invitation to pause, feel, and recognize the invisible bond between all living things. It brings together the spiritual and the earthly, the intimate and the universal through the language of installation. Suggesting that the environment is inseparable from the inner life, Punyet asks us to reflect on how love and nature mirror each other and how spirituality can be felt through the body.

We need this awareness in a world confronted by suffering and the cold takeover of automation. “Oneness” is an immersive exploration of the mysterious gap between heaven and hell, a sort of expansion of the 13 pages he sent across the ocean. His second show at Léon Gallery International is a call to step out of the digital stream, a chance to return to the permanence of the human spirit.

If only we could write our most ardent wishes in a letter and send them out across time and distance, maybe they would come true. Maybe it is in something as thoughtful as writing each other letters that we could remember how to be human again.