A week of celebrating The Spacious Path
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It’s been a little over a week since The Spacious Path was released into the world. The party is over. I am back in my beloved Trinity College hoodie, and it’s a bit chilly in Connecticut for the first weeks of summer.
Also, I found my book-signing pen. I took it to my launch party in a super special purse that was so special that I forgot all about it and was scrambling around at the last minute asking people if I could borrow a pen.
Even though I have no idea what’s happening with the sales of the book, I know that my heart is overflowing with love and celebration. It’s been a glad celebration and a bit of decompression from a year’s worth of writing and planning for the book. (True confession: On Sunday afternoon, I took a five-hour nap. And then slept again for the entire night.)
Awake and asleep, writing, publishing, and celebrating this book have been a dream come true.
The celebrations began with a hug and happy dance with my friend Beth, who happened to be with me when I first received the email from an acquisitions editor at Herald Press last spring. It continued with a champagne toast with Brian on the day I signed the contract and then a few weeks later at a little surprise party during a week of vacation with my extended family. Along the way, there were encouraging emoji-heavy texts, Voxer messages, emails, and impromptu SOS phone calls when things felt precarious. Friends would stop me in the hall after Sunday service or on the sidewalk outside of my house to ask, “Is it done?” I began to feel sheepish with all my qualifying statements: “One draft is done…sort of,” or “I’m waiting to hear back from the proofreaders!”
Providing a steady stream of encouragement required a lot of patience from my friends because I never really knew what was next. Several times, I accidentally thought I was finished and invited my squad to come over for a celebratory drink, only to cancel the invitation moments later when I received yet another request for revisions from a copyeditor. It was hard to know when I was actually “done” with the work and free to celebrate with abandon. Even when I received a box of printed books from my publisher about a month before the release date, I felt nervous. Was it okay to begin celebrating?
After I completed one of my final, final—possibly THE final—final deadlines, my friend Elise sent me the link to a podcast interview with Andy Crouch talking about practices of sabbath rest and a Rule of Life for completing creative projects. I listened to the episode slowly because my brain was exhausted, but his words about a sabbath pattern for creativity tucked into a quiet corner of my heart until I was ready to retrieve them a couple of weeks later.
So the way it's laid out in Genesis 1 is that the spirit hovers. So before God speaks, God the spirit is just hovering over the unformed reality, over chaos… and then you kind of imagine God waking up each day, as it were, hovering, speaking, seeing, resting. And then at the very end of day seven, God sits down and beholds everything he'd made. … The creative life, or the the active life of creation, in which is to act and then to evaluate because that is part of creating. “How did I do?” …we get stuck in an action-evaluation loop.…
We actually need a contemplation at the beginning, which is before I try to make anything, I just behold. I look, I attend, I listen. … Then we need the contemplation at the end which is just the glad celebration that I brought something into being and it's different from evaluation. … the book is done. It's not perfect, but it is very good because we worked as image bearers to make it as very good as we could. (Andy Crouch)
These words helped us imagine a celebration for this creative work of writing and publishing a book. We wanted a glad celebration as a way to behold the goodness of a finished, created work that reflected the glad Sabbath celebration of our Creator God. We felt God’s invitation to let this celebration be a kind of lavish feast that we don’t typically enjoy and that welcomed as many people as we could to enter into a restful party where none of our friends had to do the work of planning the party and could just show up in a restful way. Michele Torres and her staff at Harborview Market graciously and creatively turned our small budget into something lavish and delightful.
On the night before my book launched (thanks to this author for that perfect advice), we gathered around food, drinks, friends, and stacks of The Spacious Path. I found a green dress at Target, and my sister Kaley and nephews Lincoln and Caden helped Brian set up a table for stacks of books and divide bunches of chamomile into mason jars. My friend Amy brought crayons and custom-made coloring pages for anyone who needs a little bit of contemplation, even in the middle of a celebration.
Together, we celebrated the book I’d made as very good work as I could.
Still, at 6:30, watching my friends Drake and Kirstin walk through the front door, pushing a stroller in one hand and carrying a glass vase stuffed with a lavish bouquet, I felt startled. I’d been holding back the emotion of full-on celebration for so many weeks that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that the party was beginning. Not only that, but within a couple of minutes, a line of my favorite people had formed in front of the book table and extended all the way out to the outdoor patio. I laughed, I hugged a friend, and I scrambled for a pen (which, inexplicably, I could not locate). I posed for pictures in my green dress and tried to find room for all of the flowers people brought me.
For two and a half hours, we hovered over the goodness of perfectly-crusted bread topped with bruschetta and ate our fill of homemade salted-caramel cookies. Children chased each other around groups of adults, played on the platform during the toast, and then surprised me by showing up in line wanting a book with their own names inscribed. New friends, neighbors, my grandson and nephews, daughter and son-in-law, extended family members, my hairdresser!
Author Tasha Jun, who recently celebrated the launch of her book Tell Me the Dream Again said she almost canceled her launch party because it felt like too much. I understood that. I fretted that no one would come or that it would seem pretentious. I worried people would balk when I asked them to wear nametags. I thought they might feel forced to sit while I read pages of my own writing to them. Tasha says that, thanks to her launch team’s insistence that she throw the party, she was reminded that celebration is “a practice of belonging” and a “joyful resistance in a world that so often tries to snuff it out.”
Yes. Amen.
A week before the party I began praying a phrase from the collect for compline in the Book of Common Prayer: Lord, please shield the joyous. In a prayer well-known for holding the burdens of the sick, afflicted, and dying into sleep each night, sometimes this line gets overlooked. But it’s because of the reality of that kind of everyday suffering in the world, the small petition for God to protect hearts with occasion for joy makes celebration a prophetic act for the world that will finally be the reality of every day. Stand in front of our little party, God, and hold off the attacks of cynicism, division, insecurity, and social awkwardness. Hold this space for us until it is the wide-open space we’ll roam together forever.
Thank you to all of you who have celebrated with me in so many ways. Thank you, especially, to The Spacious Path (Restful) Launch Team! I am so grateful for you.
Many of the names you read in the Acknowledgements participated in the launch team in some way. Thank you, again, to Brian for being my first reader and my beloved companion in all things. (Thank you, also, for driving early morning Uber shifts for weeks to throw me the launch party I’d dreamed about.) I’m so grateful for him.
I’m so grateful for the Church of the Apostles, in particular, for the way they supported, prayed, and celebrated with me. I’m especially grateful to Amy Barker Willers for creating the most delightful resources to accompany the reading guides for the launch team.
And a great big, virtual hug to the members of my launch team who participated in our (Restful) Book Discussions in May and June—especially those of you who showed up not knowing me or anyone else. It means a lot to me. Thank you for all that you’ve added to the joy and satisfaction of writing this book—your heart, vulnerability, insight, and wisdom. Let’s stay connected.
The cutest little restful book discussion member.
Help me keep the celebration going!
I have one simple ask:
If you were able to purchase the and are beginning to enjoy it, I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave a short positive review at the following pages:
*You can share the same review in both places.
Reviews should only be 1-2 sentences and should take about 30 seconds to leave (and would make a huge difference for me).
If you can’t come up with one, here's a simple template that might help:
I read / am reading/ purchased this book because (problem you needed to solve or desire you hope to meet).
I thought The Spacious Path might help me learn/understand/grow/change (fill in the blank). I was not / have not been disappointed.
This book helped / is helping me so much. I learned / am learning a lot about (what are some things you are learning in the book).
Moving forward, I know I’ll be able to (what you plan to do/be).
I highly recommend this book to anyone who (fill in the blank with the type of person who would benefit from this book).
Here’s a review a reader recently shared:
“Tamara’s new book on how to practice a rule of life in a gentle, spacious way. I’m making my way through it slowly (because that’s how things are right now) and have really enjoyed her candid, compassionate perspective. When life feels too crazy and full, it’s easy to throw these kinds of practices out the window just to take another thing off our plates. But I think this kind invitation to walk with Jesus in our real, daily lives is so helpful.”
Here are a few more simple ways to help:
Order the book for your summer reading and add one or two more to share with friends.
Request the book at your local library or at a bookstore you love.
Snap a photo of yourself with the book and post it online (tag me and use #thespaciouspath )
We’re headed out for a couple of weeks of vacation, where I will practice being rather than doing for a few weeks. No more need to act; instead, behold and rest in the ever-expanding inner circle of God’s restful, loving presence.
And then, refreshed in God’s loving presence, I will begin again.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, friends!