Symbolism

Today is Ostara, the spring equinox. It’s been a special day on a very simple scale. Perhaps it’s filled with imageries and symbolisms. But we’ll see.

What happened was this:

I was standing at the lift on the ninth level (the level where my house is) waiting for it to arrive. Towards my right showed the school which was built a few years ago. The moment I glanced there, I saw a distinct shape, about ten to twenty meters away, at the exact height of the ninth level of the flats. Since I live about twenty minutes by bus from the coast, I’ve frequently seen storks and egrets and less frequently seen brahminy kites and white bellied sea eagles around. Rarely for the latter two, even.

Yet today, after months and months of not having seen either one of those raptors, the shape turned out to be a brahminy kite (I originally thought it was the eagle, but after Googling and comparing images, I decided the kite was closer). It was originally flying flat-planed so I couldn’t see if it were a stork or a raptor. Only when it veered to one side and I saw its claws tucked under its belly that I knew it was a raptopr.

I was pretty entranced and stood there, seeing it soar high in circles. There were multiple lightning flashes, multiple lightning strikes from the bad storm, but the kite never got hit. It just circled, riding the currents, then glided away.

If I wanted, I could call up on all the imageries and every single one of the factors which relate to me on a very personal basis:
1. The storm – storms are both physical and metaphorical things which I have used in the cleansing of my soul from bad emotions or anything else. I used to walk in storms in both thunder and lightning and face the danger of getting struck, and also facing my possible death. I always felt clean after that; today was storming;

2. Ostara – pretty much a day observed by farmers in the past to know when to sow or harvest things, which became a festival. It’s important to me as a day a kind of marking of the seasons;

3. Bird of prey – part of my identity, part of my ‘kin-ness.

I asked my Egyptian winged-dude guy (long story, you may ask) if he had anything to do with the appearance of the kite. He just gave me this smile which neither confirmed nor denied it (okay, that attitude makes me suspect he had something to do with it, heh).

But anyway. I felt some sort of elation after that; some sort of lighter emotion.

If nothing else, if I take away all the symbolism or knee-jerk reaction to any possible symbolisms to totems etc. that the new agers these days seem to do, the sight did one very important thing: it made me smile.