The Day Of The Pelican Quotes

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

On a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth—clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin. Brown pelicans rise and fall in their chorus lines in the wells of the waves, cormorants arrow, an eagle kingly queenly floats south high above the water line.

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creauture. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free

Sturdy swimmers afloat on water-couch Beneath the heavy bill their treasured pouch Fishes pray for them to fly far away Inland lakes toast to the Pelican’s day

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.

And to love such a librarian requires a surrendering to her eccentricities, a bowing to her pathological quietness, an obeisance to a reticence that is utterly untreatable. If you cannot commit to this sort of dedication, then let her be. Let her wander in wonder among her books and live out her days in her own world without you.

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day.

IF anybody had been there to observe the gentle-looking elderly lady who stood meditatively on the loggia outside her bungalow, they would have thought she had nothing more on her mind than deliberation on how to arrange her time that day. An expedition, perhaps, to Castle Cliff; a visit to Jamestown; a nice drive and lunch at Pelican Point_ or just a quiet morning on the beach. But the gentle old lady was deliberating quite other matters. She was in a militant mood.

How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day. “You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain, she floundered on. “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press. “My little orphan,” Carol said. Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

Beatniks are a youth cult that fight against society by wearing sunglasses even in inclement weather. This signifies their dislike of 'the sun', their sworn enemy. In the Beatniks' Manifesto they declare they will, one day, destroy the sun by using enormous pelicans that will trap it in their under-chin beak pouches and fly off to some distant place like the Hebrides and bury it beneath a pile of farmyard manure, and then the beatniks shall inherit the earth.

A person will struggle—she'll fight. She'll do just about anything to avoid making a decision she knows she has to make. We have got to be the most perverse creatures on the planet. Something in the human enjoys misery. It keeps us locked away, some in a mansion, some in a hovel. But then, one day—a day you don't plan, an hour you don't expect—the door opens. You have what you need, or you receive your answer. It's so obvious, and so right, and you even have the wherewithal to carry out what you need to carry out. A big angel with flaming eyes and burnished hair might as well have walked through the wall . . .

The day after I turn pro, Philly gets a call from Nike. They want to meet with me about an endorsement deal. Philly and I meet the Nike man in Newport beach, at a restaurant called the Rusty Pelican. His name is Ian Hamilton. I call him Mr. Hamilton, but he says I should call him Ian. He smiles in a way that makes me trust him instantly. Philly, however, remains wary. Boys, Ian says, I think Andre has a very bright future. Thank you. I'd like Nike to be a part of that future, to be a partner in that future. Thank you. I'd like to offer you a two-year contract. Thank you. During which time Nike will provide all your gear, and pay you $20,ooo. For both years? For eacvh year. Ah. Philly jumps in. What would Andre have to do in exchange for this money? Ian looks confused. Well, he says, Andre would have to do what Andre has been doing, son. Keep being Andre. And wear Nike stuff.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

SHOPPING and SIGHTSEEING Shopping opportunities start within a few hundred feet of the cruise ship dock (many new "duty free" shops in Port Zante) and continues on into the town of Basseterre. You can shop all day long if you wish and never be more than a 10 minute walk from your ship.  Just remember, in St. Kitts they will take American dollars but give change in Eastern Caribbean dollars, so be sure to take smaller denominations of U S bills when you go ashore. Upon disembarkation, cruise ship visitors are greeted by cultural acts, displays and exhibitions, as well as many ground operators offering various island excursions. The duty-free shopping district on Port Zante, where fine jewelry, liquor and souvenirs are available along with restaurants, is just past this area. Immediately beyond the shops lies Pelican Mall, the ground floor of which houses the headquarters of the St. Kitts Tourism Authority. Here, brochures can be picked up and inquires made.

For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.

News these days was a constant play on people’s fears, and he seldom watched it.

Once upon a time, there was a colony of water bugs. They were a close colony, a family. Where one went, the others went. But every so often, one would straggle away on their own, crawl onto a lily pad, and never return. This was a great mystery to the family of water bugs. They couldn’t figure out what was happening to their family members, or why they disappeared. They talked about it often, and worried about it, but they could never figure it out.” Finn opens his eyes now, and stares out at the water, past me, past the waves, and out to the horizon. He fixes his gaze on the red lighthouse in the distance, on the pelicans that dive for their dinner around it, and the waves that break apart against the rocks. “Well, one day, another water bug climbed onto the lily pad, drawn there by invisible forces from within itself, forces it didn’t understand and couldn’t control. As it sat there in the sun, it transformed into a beautiful dragonfly. It shed its water bug skin, and sprouted iridescent wings that gleamed in the sunlight. Wings so large and strong, it was able to fly into the air, doing loops in the sky. “The new dragonfly was ecstatic with it’s new body and thought to itself, ‘I need to go back and tell the others. They need to know that this is what happens so they won’t be scared.’ So he dipped and dove through the air, directly at the water. But unfortunately, he couldn’t dive below the surface to where the water-bugs were swimming. In his new form, the dragonfly was no longer able to communicate with his family. He felt at peace, though, because he knew that someday, his family would all transform too, and they’d all be together again.” Finn

loved the rainy days, when shadows made their mysterious ways around corners and across alleys. And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific—it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God’s own confetti snowed across those sky riots.

of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.” “Pino Lella’s prescription for a long, happy life?” I said. He laughed at that, and wagged his finger in the air. “The happy part of a long life, anyway. The song to be sung.” Pino gazed north then, across the lake to his beloved Alps, rising like impossible cathedrals in the summer air. He drank from his Chianti. His eyes misted and unscrewed, and for a long time we sat in silence, and the old man was far, far away. The lake water lapped against the retaining wall. A white pelican flapped by. A

We have no witnesses, no proof. But someone evil is moving us around like chess pieces.

It’s vital to remember that the daily counts on the news of the ‘28-day’ death figures do not represent deaths that happened in the last 24 hours, but those newly reported. Figure 11–1 shows a clear weekly cycle: the daily figures tend to be higher on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because of reporting delays over the weekend. This has led to some dramatic differences in England: there were 560 deaths reported on Monday, 18 January 2021, jumping to 1,507 the next day. Since all these numbers are released at around 4 p.m. each day, they become ‘news’ and so are given prominence by journalists, regardless of their relevance.

And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.

That's his perception of reality," Nenad responded. "He has adopted it as his interpretation and cannot break free from it, and probably doesn't even consider doing so. In fact, we too are unable to escape his worldview as it partly is our own. However, when faced with the choice between the cat and the belt, I choose the cat. It's not doomed, it's not poisoned, and it can be easily removed by hand from the engine, even if it comes at a financial cost. I have enough space in my cage for its rescue. I can imagine that within its mind, this engine has become a prison for his hopes of salvation. Overcoming our phobias of losing money in the pursuit of something else, even in small amounts, is healthy. A ground strap costs nothing, and though it may require a bit of time in a repair shop, in this day and age, we are used to wasting our time for far less. The reality of our daily lives is filled with every online distraction, like a sheet riddled with holes from moths that we wrap ourselves in out of habit without even noticing. It’s so comforting. At first, you embrace what everyone else does, what you are told to think. But eventually, you come to the realization that you have the power to dictate your thought patterns and become the architect of your ideology. You can construct a personal propaganda machine that aligns with your values and desires, creating a unique model of the world that is entirely your own. Your mind is still going to be a box in one of the billions of drawers, but it’s going to be YOUR box. Your true home. Manipulate yourself. We should manipulate ourselves towards common sense, compassion, and hope that we’ll get a good batch of people at some point so we can live among more like-minded peers. Now it’s up to our online feed. Now the education in our phone holds the reins, encapsulated in the three-second video of someone's take on history, the five-second clip of fitness models or investment strategies. And if we're fortunate, some famous person would quote Epictetus' Discourses, perhaps echoing the wisdom of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Marcus Aurelius, Sartre, etc. This is our chance for us to avoid descending into mere survival instincts without the tempering influence of morality and an understanding of the absurdity that we have created around us. To get addicted to the freedom in our minds. OR to choose the ground strap, choose to sacrifice someone else’s life so we can preserve our resources, because that’s what greed is, on a deep ancient level it’s you hoarding resources the same way a squirrel does with its winter supplies. Choose to be a squirrel rather than a human and live off your acorns. Choose to kill the cat. Choose not to ruin your precious machine. Choose the current model of society and disappear in it like a pelican getting caught in an airplane engine. Perhaps responsibility is the first and maybe even the only synonym for human purpose. Of course, there is value in the small moments we experience, but they lack foundation if they don’t fit into the break from working on something meaningful.

Man does not like to think his history is short, but so it is; so short that it is the merest instant in the Earth's history. To see this, to put man's life in context with the Earth's, imagine the whole history of the Earth compressed into the six-day week of the Biblical Creation; a scale that makes eight thousand years pass in a single second. The first day and a half of this week is too early for life, which does not appear until about Tuesday noon. During the rest of Tuesday, and also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and well into Saturday, life expands and transforms the planet: life becomes more diverse, more stable, more beautiful; life makes a home for itself and adapts itself to live there. At four in the afternoon on Saturday, the age of reptiles comes onstage; at nine in the evening it goes offstage, but pelicans and redwoods are already here, lifeforms now threatened by man's wish to have the whole world to himself. Man does not appear on the Earth until three minutes before Saturday midnight. A second before midnight, man the hunter becomes man the farmer, and wandering tribesmen become villagers. Two-fifths of a second before midnight, Tutankhamon rules Egypt. A third of a second before midnight, Kong Fuzi and Gautama Buddha walk the Earth. A fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins. It is midnight now, and some people are saying we can go on at the rate that has worked for this fortieth of a second, because we know all the answers. Do we really know that much?

Are you so far discouraged, disquieted, cast down, that your very body feeleth the smart of your discouragements? that you do not only refuse the promise, and all comfort for your soul, but even for your body? Then look into Psalm cii., and see if your case may not be paralleled, verse 4, "My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread: verse 5, "By reason of the voice of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin:" verse 6, "I am like a pelican of the wilderness, and I am like an owl of the desert:" verse 9, "I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping:" verse 10, "Because of thine indignation and thy wrath; for thou hast lifted me up and cast me down:" verse 11, "My days are like a shadow that declineth; and I am withered like grass." Oh, but I am not only so far discouraged, as to refuse comfort for soul and body, but my soul refuseth duty, and casts off duty too for the present.

Children are the most precious gift God can bestow on us.  They are gifts to be treasured from the moment they let out their first cry to the day we watch them pledge their lives to another person to the day we leave this earth.

Hear my prayer O Lord and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me; in the day when I call answer me speedily. For my days are consumed like smoke and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread... I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

God is never cruel. He always has a plan, and he sees beyond this temporal life. It might not be what we’d have chosen, but he always works things together for our good.

And we’ll take it one step at a time. God isn’t surprised by this. This is where our fear meets the bedrock of our faith.

Everything in this life can fail. I have to keep reminding myself that only God is faithful and never fails us. Things are bleak, life is unfair, but this isn’t over yet. We will see God work.

We keep walking the right direction in spite of not being able to see the path.

Fear was a suffocating companion that constantly tried to smother his faith.