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A rainbow at midnight in Alaska.

Ask “ What is your favorite day of the year?” and you may expect to hear Christmas, Thanksgiving, my child’s birthday or my anniversary, but for me it’s Summer Solstice — the day that the sun shines longer than on any other day of the year. To me the sun has always represented promise — the promise that things will grow and that life will go on, even during our deepest pain or hardest struggles. So on the day that to most symbolizes the official beginning of summer, I look to the sky and see the promise of bigger and better things to come.

My love affair with the long, sun-filled day of the Summer Solstice began far before I began working at Antenna Group with companies that harness the power of the sun to provide energy. But now that I am here it seems like a natural fit for my soul, and for me. After all, the sun provides me with strength, so of course it should power my world as well.

In my quest to enjoy the longest possible Solstice day, I once spent it in Alaska, where I found myself rafting in

Class 5 rapids at 10:30 p.m. with hours of light still to enjoy. While the trip was marked with amazing

Prince William Sound

adventures, including kayaking in Prince William Sound and rappelling into a crevasse of the Matanuska Glacier, one aspect of this experience impacts my thoughts and my work every day. This is the fact that there I found people so committed to conserving resources and caring for the earth that this desire shaped nearly everything in their lives.

The owner of the tour company that I traveled with, Exposure Alaska, lives completely off the grid.  His home has no indoor plumbing; rather, his family uses an outhouse — all of the time. (This may be farther than I am willing to go). He has a solar powered hot tub in his yard (I can get down with that) and a vegetable garden to eat from (works for me). The tour group spent nearly our entire week living this same way: we camped in tents, used the “facilities” wherever we could find a little privacy, cooked on campfires and even enjoyed a cheesecake that our guide made by chilling it in a glacial runoff stream. Who knew you could do that?

Isn't nature awesome?

Would it have been easier to head back to a comfortable hotel room and take a long, hot shower after an exhausting day of hiking, kayaking, etc? Of course it would have. But the experience not only helped the members of the tour group bond with each other, it also bonded us with the earth. Perhaps more importantly, it taught us how much we can live without and, for some of us, how dependent we have become on amenities that may make our life easier at the moment but don’t help our spirits soar or our earth thrive.

Does taking the car for a short trip to the store save time?  Yes. But would the walk have made your lungs take in fresh air, forced your blood to pump and perhaps given you the opportunity to see a beautiful sunset that you may have missed while focused on making it through a yellow light before it turned red? Probably.

So on this, the longest day of the year, I encourage you to feel the power of the sun and let it energize you. While it is likely that I’ll still need my Starbucks for an extra midday boost, I just may walk to get it. How will you celebrate the Solstice?

Laura Finlayson

– Laura Finlayson is not a ninja, guru or maven; she is just a seasoned PR pro with expertise in social media program development and execution. When she is not working you might find her doing extreme sports like climbing glaciers, hiking in the desert in extreme heat, rappelling off 200+ foot cliffs, or simply chilling in the Bronx watching her beloved NY Yankees. Follow Laura on Twitter @lauramfin.

While I’m not the world’s biggest fan of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” I can appreciate the benefits the show provides for a variety of deserving families, as well as the boost a product can receive from being featured on it. So when I heard one of my clients, Akeena Solar, would be providing a featured solar system to a family in Southern California that was being highlighted on the show, I started getting excited. What could be better for a solar company than a little celebrity endorsement from none other than the well-tanned, well-groomed Ty Pennington with the well-spiked hair?

When I first heard the news a few months ago, the episode wasn’t set to air until the end of March. Immediately, Akeena crews hustled down to San Bernardino to install the system in what amounted to a matter of hours. It was then that I started paying a bit more attention to the show: nearly every weekend the builders featured a new green building element—bamboo floors, eco-friendly paint, energy efficient appliances, and lots and lots of solar systems. And each time the green element was explained, it seemed to become more and more…well, normal, to feature these types of products. They look great and are environmentally friendly, the designers said. They are quality products with real cost-savings benefits, the builders said. They just made sense, Ty said.

Installing Akeena's Andalay Solar Panels

Had going green become mainstream?

For a while, my public relations team was able to rely on the uniqueness of solar when pitching the media. We could leverage the story of that kooky family down the block who installed a solar system, watched their meter spin backwards and never paid the electric company more than $12. But that was because not everyone had a solar system; people weren’t accustomed to seeing silicon panels popping up on rooftops everywhere. Fast-forward a few months, and solar—while not reaching the point of widespread adoption by any means—is no longer unfamiliar. Journalists tell me that the latest installation isn’t big enough, it isn’t sexy enough, and it’s something they’ve already covered. During those lonely hours watching late-night television, green suddenly begins to work its way into the vocabulary of infomercials and QVC. And green guides everywhere are popping up telling consumers how to shop.

It’s still a long road for green products to be the default choice in consumer’s brains. But with millions of viewers tuning in each weekend to see how easily green elements can be incorporated into homes, it’s going to get a lot easier to be green.