A few years ago, my husband made me an infinite lunchbox for my birthday. That's me in the pic below.

Someday I'll make infinite lunchboxes for my kids. And maybe even make them as swag. You send me a photo of yourself, and I'll send you an infinite lunchbox.

Little did I know how formative these observations would be.

They led to Reckonings: https://twitter.com/stephlepp/status/1498351935434280962

And attempts to redraw the lines: https://twitter.com/stephlepp/status/1475859017708670980

He was going on and on about the endangered spotted owl and the giant salamander, and the City Council members' eyes were glazing over. They'd obviously heard this all before. And I thought: 'this is not changing their minds. How DO people change their hearts and minds?'

I thought: 'I want to be on the same side as the trees AND the people. The way these lines are drawn doesn't make sense to me.'

The other thing I noticed was the response from the City Council members. Our representative from the Redwood Action Team was testifying before them.

First, I noticed that the people who we were protesting against looked like very humble people. They were the loggers and their families. They looked like migrant workers. And I thought to myself: 'I don’t want to be on the opposite side from these people.'

At the time, an activist named Julia Butterfly Hill (@juliabfly) was living in a nearby redwood tree. We called her from the protest. She gave us a pep talk, ON SPEAKER, from her redwood tree.

It was all very exciting, but I noticed something strange.

Two things, actually:

It probably took me one or two more years to realize: I still don't totally know what's up. My mind is in a process of expanding. WHOA 🤩🤯