

From inception, humans are fascinated with the natural world. Our formative years are known as our most inquisitive and from the time we can crawl we exhibit so much curiosity towards the world around us. However, we always display a deeper instinct or understanding towards certain natural stimuli. Everyone can recognize the difference between fresh air, and air that is pumped into a building, everyone knows what the birds sound like in the morning or what crickets sound like on a hot summer night, but these images and feelings create more than nostalgia, they can create a connection from an author to a reader. The use of natural imagery in text is common and heavily used, but in “Joyas Voladoras” the author uses it in a profound and descriptive sense. Taking the various fascinations and differences between humming birds and people to explain to someone how their own mind works is not something most writers would do, but Brian Doyle excels at it. Doyle uses comparisons between the lives and innate features of various animals to relate back to our own functions and inner drives. This method of natural description and comparison aids Brian’s message of the mastery of our own human heart. 

This word heart is emphasized in the essay constantly. 

“A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas volardores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.” (Doyle)  

Doyle uses the heart of one of the smallest animals in the world, the humming bird, and one of the biggest hearts in the world of the blue whale. The features and nature of the animals are compared and used in contrast to display a message of how different and unique our world is and how both people and animals are born with very different centers. This sort of juxtaposition between the humming bird and the whale give an almost ironic differentiation in how big or small the heart can be. The use of the heart itself as a connection to people’s emotions is an interesting comparison, and is almost second nature, but the interesting route Doyle takes in explaining the heart through animals is to use the heart and even metabolic rates to give a picture of how much variety and choice there is in biology and emotion. “You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.” (Doyle) Humming birds pick to expend their tiny hearts going faster than imaginable and therefore burn out quick. While whales in their large, graceful hearts live in sheer mystery and awe as they float and moan about the ocean. 

The connection a reader makes is to imagine a whale and a humming bird in their natural habitats and then connect those images and ideas on those animals to themselves and their own journeys. A reader may resonate more with the excitement of the humming bird or the beauty of the blue whale, but either way the reader easily is somewhat intrigued by these natural descriptions. These descriptions offer a medium to which a reader can grant an image and feeling that cover a range of emotions and messages. This leads to introspection on the reader’s part and is a purposeful effect from the author to allow us to dig deeper into how we ourselves relate to such animals, even though they are entirely different from us and from each other. 

The conclusion one comes to when analyzing the animals’ behaviors and physical descriptions is that we are all made up of different pieces and have different styles, but overall we must stay headstrong in the defense of our own needs and shortcomings. 

“But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts slugging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.” (Doyle)

Humming birds like us have the potential to die out, and die out quick, if they are not careful. This safeguarding and fragility that hummingbirds experience is comparable to what Doyle mentions on later in relation to the human heart. “When 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 hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.” (Doyle) No avoidance of the harsh world around us can take away the inevitability of challenge and even the inevitability of pain and death. However, with that knowledge in mind one has to carry forward. Alone or otherwise this choice is still unique to the person making the decision. 
