"Joyas Voldares" by Brian Doyle begins with "Consider the humming bird for a long moment" (Doyle 64).  Beginning the essay with these words makes you see the hummingbird hovering in flight and at the same time asks you to take your time to consider what he is about to write about.  He sets the tone that you should not to rush through the essay, encouraging you think about the point he is going to try and make.  Doyle by the end of his essay reveals that the heart is more than just a machine in our chests that drives us as humans but is much more, an emotional piece of us that is vulnerable.

Doyle uses descriptive words throughout his essay which help the reader imagine they are witnessing what he is writing about.  One can just see them flying around from flower to flower.  We can see the humming bird's heart, the size of a pencil beating so fast it can't be heard.  So small yet one of the strongest heart on earth allowing it to do so much but requiring to be fed all the time.  Doyle describes the heart saying "Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut.  They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles-anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight" (Doyle 65).  So descriptive it is almost like a biology paper.  Just when you think how wonderful it may be to have the heart of hummingbird Doyle starts telling you about the hummingbird's weaknesses.  How even with this incredible heart that lets it do amazing things it can crash and burn and how all that energy requires so much effort.  

The job of a heart in any animal is to provide them with life, it is the engine for everything they do and just as it gives them life it means they must rely on it to survive.  Doyle gives us the image of a humming bird flying for 500 miles only to stop for food and end up dying because it uses all its energy and is affected by the colder weather and/or lack of food.  Doyle makes the heart the main theme and how it gives life to all living things and that no matter what the animal the heart has a limited life span.  Whether it is quickly like a hummingbird who uses all its beats in two years or slowly like a tortoise who uses theirs over two hundred years.  Doyle states that "Every creature has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime" (Doyle 65).  Doyle reminds the reader that their heartbeats are numbered, and not to let them go to waste. Use your heartbeats for with memories, emotions, and knowledge, and do not take your beats for granted use them, you can be a tortoise using them slowly but living a long life or you can use them like a humming bird, pushing yourself every day and living a short but energetic life. It is all about how you want to live your life. 

Doyle gives us a new visual to imagine, from the pencil eraser of the hummingbird to room sized heart of the blue whale, the largest heart known to mankind.  A heart that a child could walk around in with valves the size of swinging doors.  Doyle gives the reader great detail about the blue whale and that despite its size and hwo many exist that once this monstrous creature hits puberty it drops off the face of the earth. It is ironic how we know so much about their heart and the size of it, yet so little about the rest of their lives except that they travel in pairs.  The reason Doyle appears to point this out becomes more obvious as we read further.  This can be related to human life, We know so much about the human heart and how it works but we will never truly know what goes on inside a person's heart. We will not know what they are truly feeling and what they want to do with their life but we seem to want to share life with someone else. 

Doyle describes how all living things have some form of a heart no matter how big or small.  They come in different sizes and may work in different ways but they all provide a source of life.  Doyle makes a reference to what happens inside of every living creature, he says "No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside." (Doyle 66).  We can interpret this in two different ways, the first is very literal that we all have some sort of liquid inside of us and that is what keeps us alive and apart of the world that we live in or are a part of.  The second is more of a conceptual interpretation of how we all have something going on inside of us, the "churn" aspect of the quote, we all have problems that we deal with no matter what or who we are, we have issues and internal struggles that we encounter on a day to day basis.

The final paragraph is a powerful piece of writing that compels the reader to think and examine life and the way it impacts us through our hearts.  Doyle goes from an entire essay describing the hearts of animals and what they are physically to what the heart means emotionally to us as humans.  He says "So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment." (Doyle 66). Doyle use of these words turns the physical heart into the emotional centerpiece of our lives.  How we have expectations and heartache because of life and that we cannot protect ourselves from these experiences by building walls to protect us.  Everyone's heart is different we all have a different life different memories, experiences and each person knows the true capacity of their own heart. He proceeds to talk about how we try to open up our heart to people we care about but in the end we are all alone. That is what we are afraid of,  being alone which is why we open up to the ones who mean the most to us, so we don't have to be alone. "When we are young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all the hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore". (Doyle 66)  There may never be another person who will be there for you all the time no matter what but that is part of living each beat. Sometimes the only person that we think will be there for you in the toughest of times is yourself and that we can live with those walls we build.  But just because we think we can protect our hearts from damage and hurt and that we will not be soft and vulnarable we cannot ever truly shield ourselves from these things.  More important we should not try.  We are the only ones who truly understand what our life has meant, and how we have repaired all of the scares and bruises that our heart has suffered throughout our life. We are still shaken up by these injuries, but over the years we have learned how to deal with them and let them help us in our everyday lives. 

In the end of the essay Doyle shows no matter how tough we may think we are the simplest thing can break down any walls we thought we may have built. "You can brick up your heart as stout and as tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can but down in comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.") (Doyle 66).  When you read into this you cannot help but feel some moment in your life where we put up a wall that came instantly down when something similar happened and at once all the barriers fell.  

The essay was never about the humming birds or the blue whales, it was about the heart.  We can study the mechanics of how it works in different living things and how it can be as small as an eraser or as big as a room but there is more to the heart, as strong as it is it is always vulnerable to something and that is what living is about.

