This weekend has been incredible – but I would not be telling the whole story if I didn't say it was a little tough too.  Watching the photos flood in from all corners of the world and seeing the faces of people I've been organizing with for months for the first time was awesome, inspiring, exciting and all of the above.  I went between jumping up and down to tearing up from the overwhelming, sorta weirdly sad but happy feeling you get sometimes when you just recognize the earnest attempt of humans trying their best and do what is right.

I was so humbled as I saw photos of the young scouts in Philippines planting trees, the people in Bangladesh standing in flood water up to their knees asking the world to come together and stop polluting and students in Iraq installing solar panels.  I just sat back and thought – wow.  Then the next thought I had was, eat this up CNN, New York Times and the SF Chronicle. That is when my day got hard. I sat in our office in downtown Oakland with over 50 events going on within 30 miles of me re-calling through hundreds of  Bay Area reporters inviting them again to go out to one of the events. These were the type of reponses I got: we are under staffed, we just wrote something on climate change, there is a lot going on with the blue angels and the giants baseball team in the playoffs. I couldn't believe that most of the Bay Area major media outlets were going to sit this one out.  Wow- what more could they ask for?

Just as I started to slump into a defeated mode – BAM this photo popped up.  This BEAUTIFUL photo of my sister, boyfriend and my very best friends getting to work in my friends backyard in San Francisco, mud on their hands and smiles on their faces. I remebered at that moment what this was all about – it was about individuals taking action, building community and saving the planet together…and that was exactly what was happening outside the walls of my office. I set down the phone, looked through the flickr site for ten minutes then picked back up the phone and, with even more vigor than before, continued to pitch reporters.