Chris Bickford

Even if you live here year-round, you know that the Outer Banks is a summer place. Much as we love our uncrowded and beautiful off-season, we all know that we owe everything to Summer, for without it this place would not survive. Summer is when the Outer Banks comes alive, when the cash rolls in, when the beaches fill with colorful umbrellas and pasty families that turn beet red by Tuesday, then dark tan just as it’s time to leave…Summer is when the road gets congested and everybody curses Pennsylvania drivers (it is a well-accepted public opinion around here that Pennsylvania drivers are the worst)…Summer is when the college kids come down and rent houses on our streets, crank their music in the wee hours and party on their front porches like they were still at the frat house…Summer is a time of new friends, new love, crazy nights, trips “down south”, and barbecue afternoons. We measure the years in summers, for though the off-seasons are all pretty much the same, each summer is unique. Summer is a time of hot sultry days and sea-breezy nights…a time of earth-shaking thunderstorms that sweep in out of nowhere with cooling winds, chiaroscuro skies, and a fireshow over the ocean at night. Summer is a time of transitions, life changes, discoveries…A time of longboards, flat spells, and mind-blowing sunsets. Okay, every season here is a season of mind-blowing sunsets, but summer’s sunsets have a special character about them…

This summer on the Outer Banks was a bit slow. The economy is down, both the summer kids and the weekly family renters can’t afford much more than rent anymore, so the restaurants and bars have been pretty quiet. It’s also been a strange time for my little community of friends, as many of us are dealing with changes, transitions, scaling back on extravagance, finding other ways to make money, dealing with personal and relationship problems…For me this summer was the culmination of a long and difficult period of change, and I suffered kicking and screaming all the way through it. Eventually life forces you to deal with loss; it is part of the passage of life. Some losses are easier than others, but one thing is guaranteed, and that is that no loss you have yet suffered in your life will be the greatest. Life saves that one for the end. And as some people wiser than me have often said, it is those difficult passages in life that offer the greatest opportunities for communing with your deepest self, and discovering places in your soul you’ve never explored before.

I have been blessed with a number of caring, insightful friends who helped me through this time, and for them I will always be grateful. Most of them are represented in this post, and this is my little thank-you for them. The compassion and thoughtfulness they have shown me have been life-affirming, and I only hope I can return the favor any ole time, and we can keep spreading that thing outward in our world, because that’s the thing…

Here’s a little excerpt from the book companion to the “Alchemy Cards”, a set of Tarot-inspired divination cards using archetypal symbols. My friend Michelle pulled the “Open Heart” card for me one afternoon at the beach, and it became my symbol for this time:

“Love is as close as the air we breathe, as natural as the rising and falling of the waves, as simple as the sun’s rays caressing the earth, yet with our dualistically inclined minds, we make it something complicated, remote, and ultimately, unattainable. Indeed, ignorance about the true nature of love is the single greatest cause of human suffering. So, let us be more careful and contemplative in our approach to love. Imagine for a moment that love has two dimensions: the horizontal, confined and enclosed by time and space; and the vertical, representing the infinite, eternal link with the spirit. Human love often gets caught up in the horizontal zone, fostering the desire to own, possess, and control one’s “love object”. Such strategies, motivated by fear, are doomed to fail.

“Aphrodite offers love to humanity from the vertical plane. Her love is unbound by time; it is endless, eternal, and deeply fulfilling. It embraces each of us every moment of every day. It resides in the cave of our heart and expands outward, unconditinally, once the virtue of self-love has been mastered within the soul body of the individual. The archetypal qualities of Aphrodite’s love arise from the transcendent realm of non-duality and freedom. Unification with her love engenders wholeness, for she bridges the polar opposites of masculine and feminine within her golden light.

“You are invited into the golden chambers of the Love Goddess. Let the elixir of love that that Aphrodite pours into your heart chalice overflow with sensuality, freedom, generosity, and unconditional love for yourself and others…Dare to be the rapturous beauty that lives in your heart.

Amidst all the blues and hard times, we did manage to have some fun this summer. Tiki parties, music gigs, concerts in Virginia, happy hour at the Harveys’, the first annual OBX Pier-to-Pier swim, frisbee afternoons on the beach, and lots of small surf. Having fun in the summer is an obligation here sometimes; sometimes you’d rather sit on the couch with the A/C cranking and feel miserable about your sorry life. But you live at the beach. You are required by law to play…