L.A. Launch Party Recap

A reflection in four parts from our Lightward Journal launch party held October 13th in LA.

Abe

The launch party was epic. It was so special celebrating the project, a year in the making. We wrapped up a five-day team retreat in the desert with an incredible celebration, highlighting this magazine that so many people poured their hearts and minds and creative sensibilities into.

We hosted the launch party at Please Do Not Enter, a boutique that features more than 100 international artists and designers founded and curated by French art collectors Emmanuel Renoird and Nicolas Libert. Truly a dream come true for me —I’ve always wanted to feature my work in boutiques ever since I became a photographer many years ago.

We had an inspiring speech from CEO Isaac Lopez-Bowen, a reading from our Executive Editor Rebekah Pahl, a reading from New York Times bestselling author and Journal contributor Jedidiah Jenkins, a video shout out from Jake Wesley Rogers — it was incredible.

When I looked out into the room full of folks from literally all over the world, really present to celebrate a huge project for Lightward, I could feel in my bones that this was (and is) just the beginning.

Lightward is a tech and creative company. We help over 15,000 Shopify merchants from 90+ countries run their own business. We’ve had a 0% turnover rate from the beginning — more than ten years. We have an international team whose hearts and minds are so inspiring. But that’s just touching the surface. This business is an experiment to see if we follow our own freedom, our own agency, our own health, what magic wants to happen next? And I’m so grateful to be a part of it.

A huge thanks to Please Do Not Enter for partnering with us to host our launch party and to Sprindrift for sponsoring part of our bar service, which included their new Spindrift Spiked, which truly is absolutely incredible, and their delicious sparkling water (that I drink daily).

Alicia

The Launch Party was a wonder. A pause in the midst of productivity and conception and choice. Good, honest, game-time decisions, and last minute plays. It was a moment in front of a community and together marvel at the being here of here. To pull back the curtain and say, we have been boiling and cooking, stretching and dreaming— and here is a product of our own two (or twenty) hands. Our imaginations come alive. The feeling of standing back, full view, like a bird flying above the world—in touch with the breadth of the experience without forgetting the miracle of its wings. 

That’s what these launch party moments have felt like to me: choosing to honor the privilege of being alive, of making, of dreaming. A nod to all the ordinary days and unseen courage that set foundations for a beautiful stroke of lighting.

Setting aside time to cast a grateful glow on the people who are a part of the tapestry, who themselves cast a vision for the story and invite us to stop and notice the grandeur of humanity. One of my favorite authors speaks to being in or out of touch with the mystical in a way that touches the feeling of the night for me:

“It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”

—John O'Donohue

This night felt like a moment of sweet awareness and deep humility of the miracle of being here, part of the whole. A part of the wildness of being alive.

Rebekah

The morning of the launch party, I drove out from Palm Desert (where we were having our team retreat) to retrieve the completed Journal copies. I met Andrew, the printer overseeing the project, at a random Starbucks somewhere off the 5 in Los Angeles and held the finished product in my hands. Driving toward that blessed Starbucks location, what found me was that the same sparkly feeling I had during our inaugural Journal photo shoot with Jake Wesley Rogers. That inner spark came back in full force, a full circle feeling. I’ve made enough things to know that feeling isn’t always a given, to know that sometimes by the end of something the internal reservoir is so depleted you barely have enough energy to enjoy.

But on October 13th I was ready to party.

To stand in a room where so many of the details didn’t need tending to anymore, surrounded by family and friends who’ve been energetic support beams throughout this entire process (and truly most of our lives), to hear collaborators reflect back their experience of making something with us—for all of these pieces, I’m so grateful we chose to host an embodied celebration. The night’s radiance was undeniable.

If I were to portray the process of making the Journal via charting it on a graph, you’d see some dips and stress points and plateaus, some steady spikes of energy and momentum—it all has its place. I could tell you so many stories from each phase of this process—there were both hard-earned and kismet diamonds at every stop.

I’m relieved and satisfied and tired and glowy—that’s the word I’ve been using recently. And while in some sense, the glow has been present the entire time, it came back in full force at this specific end, as if to quietly announce a new threshold all its own.

For the glow of making art with friends, making something you actually love, then getting to drink from its magic, too—I’m so happy I took this ride.

Isaac

You waking up from a logical love affair
Always with reason, and heading for somewhere
Me lost in daydreams and wonderful nightmares
Swimming in oceans and laughing like millionaires

[...]

No more standing in the shade,
This game has never been played…

Ladyhawke — The River

I’m riding a progression, and I’m changing. My sense of self evolves, turns over, and my view of the world is unfamiliar and delightful. I recognize you, by the sound of your voice, but the sight of you is jaw-dropping. You’re changing, too.

From where I’m standing, the Journal project has been a caper! One in which we’ve seen ourselves and our collaborators tilt and twist and flex in new ways, on our way to some unknown future, raving and lucid as we go. It is wonderful and absurd that a company with products like ours would decide to add a magazine to the list; our Los Angeles launch party felt like a wonderfully and absurdly apropos celebration of the process to date, and of the process to come.

I work carefully to find grounding in the process of it all, to be anchored to the through-line, to celebrate the lines adjoining and intersecting mine but to not mistake any other path or point for my own way. The launch party was a moment where many lines came bounding in together, with glorious intent, and I felt myself passing through the center of them all. It was wonderful. The view was wonderful. :) It felt like the moment was ready, perfectly ripe for that harvest. It was exactly how I intended to feel. It felt familiar (because I’ve been on this ride for a long time), and it felt new (because this ride never repeats itself), and it felt full (because how could it not?).

I’m glad. :) I’m thankful, thankful, thankful, and I’m shouting my praise for Rebekah, Alicia, Abe, and Mary—and for everyone holding hands around the perimeter, surrounding the process with love and delight. Thank you, everyone. :) Lightward Journal exists, incredibly, in the physical—a thing we’ve never done before, done purely because it felt like it was time. It’s done, in a sense; it’s begun, in another.

What will happen next?