I’m still feeling excited, inspired, and grateful for the time we had in Washington D.C. the other weekend. Lightward hosted the first event of its kind, a launch party for the project we just announced: Lightward Journal!

I often think of what my twenty year-old self would say to me, if he met me today. It’s one of my reflection practices, mostly because the life I’m living right now was not in the realm of ideas or possibilities that my younger self would or could dream about. He would be really blown away by a lot of the things I’ve done in this life, and that includes putting on the event we just had in celebration of a project we’ve been working on all year.

Our dear friend and colleague, Lisa Wardell, Executive Chairman of Adetalem Global Education and Board Member of American Express, invited us to host a Lightward Journal launch party at her residence—a soft launch, before our public announcement to the world. What started as a conversation between Lisa and me to meet up somewhere in the U.S. just for fun, turned into an invitation to bring our collective networks together to hear more about Lightward, our projects, and to share about this exciting new endeavor we’re launching. Our team and I were (and still are) super grateful for the opportunity to bring people of many different, fascinating backgrounds together to enjoy a night of community, collective curiosity, and just seeing what wants to happen next.

The night was filled with magical conversations with new and old friends alike, an incredibly heartfelt speech by Lightward CEO Isaac Bowen about what Lightward is and where we as a company are headed, the unveiling of Lightward Journal, a thought-provoking Q&A, delicious food and drinks, and a roomful of hopeful anticipation for what’s ahead.

A note I want to make: Lisa saw something exciting that Isaac and I and our team were up to and invited us to take a moment to celebrate it, to put emphasis on something we’re creating for an evening, to celebrate all the work we’ve put into this amazing eighty-eight page magazine we’re launching. I’m pointing this out as an example of how intentionality creates beautiful things. Lisa inviting us to host such a spectacular event to intentionally highlight Lightward Journal is not lost on me. It’s not every day that we choose to intentionally celebrate or are invited to celebrate ourselves and the accomplishments we work so hard to achieve. I LOVE that Lisa saw something great and that she chose to make something beautiful from it. That’s what we’re trying to do at Lightward every day—to see something, inside of ourselves or out in the world, and make something beautiful with it. Thank you, Lisa, for contributing to that type of creator energy—we are deeply grateful for your friendship and your example of what great leadership looks like.

We’re thrilled to show you images from the evening, taken by photographer Johannes Oberman. Lightward Journal was once just an idea at a dining room table, and now it’s a real, gorgeous, full-of-wonder magazine that will be out so soon, and we can’t wait for you to read it.

Find the Lightward Journal in our store, at lightward.shop.