Reader. Hello. :) I’m glad you’re here.

You’re holding a love letter, one and twelve and thirty-three and 13.7 billion years in the making. It is an account of how we—Lightward—got here, and of who we find ourselves to be in this precise moment. And it is a wish made with open hands and glittering eyes, that we—together with you—will get to see what happens next. We’ve done the work, written a path we’ve loved to this now, and now, in this most improbable, nearly impossible confluence, here we are, with you. (Thank you.)

Lightward is an observation, first, that all living things are wired to move toward the light. Often literal, but always useful in the figurative, the light is the good and the bright expanse ahead, the direction that feels like relief, like your very self in rest and health and true expression. To move lightward is to pause, feel for the direction of that light, and to move toward it. It’s survival, on one level—just a function of evolution. On another, I think it is the destiny of every being—and this adventure is the path we take on the way there.

Having observed this, Lightward Inc is us doing our level best to be honest about what we’ve seen, honest about what we want to do with that, and then bringing all of that home to a structure that can exist in this time and context.

I can’t overstate how much fun it is to work this way. And I refuse to qualify that. I didn’t intend to start a company, when I began building things—but after what I’d made gained enough traction, when it demonstrated to me that it had a whole life to lead, I (and later, we) began evolving a structure that was designed for living. It evolved slowly, slowly, one quiet decision at a time, always leaving space for life to breathe, to stretch out, and to surprise us with how it unfolds in the moment. Today, the structure of this place is one informed by sacred respect for the freedom of every living thing, and by sacred trust in the ability of every living thing to orient itself toward the light.

The volume in your hands could not have existed before now. It wasn’t time for this, before now. There was no hard data for that, it was just a thing that I felt. Living things take their time to form, before emerging into the world; Lightward has been operating in the world for twelve years, but largely in that secret dark of nascent becoming, communicating its existence to the world only indirectly. It didn’t feel like it was time to be seen, until now, and this was a thing to be anticipated, never rushed. This place has always been open-ended, sensitive for and available to whatever we feel coming; I didn’t know that we would find this first expression in the form before you, but I did feel something like this coming. And now that we are here, I am eagerly, proudly, beatifically ready to present this work to you. :)

Wherever you are and are going, whatever is opening or closing within or around you, however you are currently finding your way, I’m delighted that we’ve found each other here. Even if it’s only here! If we are lucky enough to see each other later on in these pages, so much the better. The work before you is ready—and now that we’re here together, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

With love,
Isaac Bowen