Catch of the day

Mardi shares her wonderful experience about the one that didn’t get away…but not without some precious assistance from above:

“It was an experience I had with a Brahminy Kite.” *

“I had a sense that the Brahminy Kite was a bit of, ah, my totem, if you like, and whenever I saw one it was always like my heart would always soar and I would feel like I was up there with it, y’know. And a lot of my paintings used to always be done with that perspective, of looking down from great height and looking down at landscape from up high. So I have lots of different stories about them [Brahminy Kites].”

“But one particular one was around the time we first moved to [this area]. I had been really busy all day, and all day I had been thinking, ‘Oh God, I really l feel like some fish, I really feel like some fish today’ but I had just had one of those days when I’d been busy busy busy. And finally, I went into [local town], which is near where I live and I went to the fish shop and they were just closing…”

“Sorry, we have closed the day.”
“Oh bugger – no fish.”

“So then I went to the [local] Co-op, by this time it was probably more like 4[pm] in the afternoon… I thought, ‘Oh fish, y’know, hangin’ out for it.’ But I went to the Co-op, and they had run out!… You know, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This is really weird’. But I thought, ‘Oh well, I’ll survive.’ ”

“But on the way home I decided to go and have a swim. And it was one of those magic days where the beach was just [perfect] – we had a westerly [wind] and it was quite flat seas, but there had been these great dips in the ocean bed, so it was like these beautiful big baths were there…”

“And I had been swimming around in that and floating and looking up to the sky and then I saw the Brahminy Kite and I went, ‘Aaah hi! Hello up there!’ And was just mentally beaming out to him or her. And then, much to my amazement, I just saw it do this incredible dive – it dived into the ocean and came up holding this huge fish in both talons and I’m going, ‘Oh my God, oh my God what a moment!’ You know, to witness that. And then I thought, ‘Well, that was amazing – that was such a lovely moment.’ …But as he pulled it up from the water and was starting to fly away…he dropped it and I went, ‘Oooaww no.’ ”

Anyway, I got out of the water and was drying myself and I turned back and I saw what I thought was silver foil or something floating in the water and I thought, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to go and get that out.’ So I waded back into the water…toward this flickering light thing… [because] I couldn’t work out what it was. And I couldn’t believe it but it was the fish floating over this sandbar and into the pool where I was! [laughs] So I picked the fish up and I had to carry it in both arms and it was as big as a watermelon – it was huge!

And that night we had fish and I fed six people! [laughs] …It was amazing…

That was my sense of connection with the Brahminy Kite and I guess with God and consciousness and all that. Y’know, here I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I really want fish, I really feel like I need fish today.’ And, yeah, I got the freshest fish ever. It was just wonderful.

And then whenever I used to go anywhere [travelling up the Australian coast]… and every time I went into a beach town there would be a Brahminy Kite there and it was like my sign that this was the right place to stop for a while – I had a really nice thing with Brahminy Kites.