Welcome to the Summer Solstice, the Longest Day of the year. I woke up this morning, asking myself, “how will I use this gift of time and light?

I will kiss my wife and give thanks for her, and hopefully love her to start the day.

I will take my camera and the dogs out to the pasture and capture some of the color and feeling I always find out there (I was rewarded with this portrait of Maria right away.)

I will blog and share some of my photos (doing that now.)

I will drive to Albany for a 1 p.m. meeting with a mother of nine from Africa who desperate needs to move with  her nine children.  At least two of them are adopted, their parents were murdered in civil wars. She has a good job and takes care of herself, she needs some help in putting down a deposit for a safer apartment, a drug den has opened up right next door to her, and she fears for her sons.

She will let me photograph and talk to her,  will share her story and Ali and I will figure out how and if we can help her. We’ll spend a couple of hours with her, and come up with a plan to help her. We are in a good place with this work, on a roll.

Then back home. I’ll do more writing, perhaps take a brief nap, something that has become important to me, I will put my earphones and listen to “Hundreds of Days,” from Mary Lattimore, the very beautiful and surprising harpist. She is called by some the “monarch of instrumental harp.”

She has become part of a daily meditation for me. She comforts my spirits.

This afternoon, I’ll bring some drawing and writing tools to Ed Gulley, they should be arriving at the farm today. I will sit with him and talk and harass him a bit, it perks him up.

Late, if I have time, I’m going to read more of Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Love.” Now, I am reading about sanity and alienation. Many of us feel alienation in our time, thanks to the loss of community and the rise of too much technology and too little compassion and decency in our civic world.

The results of alienation, writes Fromm, are: “that man regresses to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that he loses his sense of self, becomes dependent on approval, hence tends to conform and yet to feel insecure; he is dissatisfied, bored, and anxious, and spends most of his energy in the attempt to compensate for or just cover up this anxiety. His intelligence is excellent, his reason deteriorates and in view of his  technical powers he is seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race.”

Sounds like Washington to me, and the angry people we see on cable news all the time.

Alienation hurts, drains and kills. Love is the answer. So I will honor the Longest Day by practicing love wherever it is possible.

And of course, I will blog about all of this. I wish you a meaningful Longest Day, and I hope you can use it well and with peace and compassion.