
In the essay Joyas Voladoras, Brian Doyle employs the use of strong metaphors in order to show the different ways there are for a person to live their life. Doyle uses these metaphors along with multiple supporting factors from the ways that many animals live their lives. He uses the hummingbird to show that someone could live their life fast and short, the tortoise to show that a slow and long life is also possible, he then ties them both together with the use of the blue whale which is included in order to show how no matter how someone lives their life that love is an essential and important part of the life of all creatures.

The first lifestyle that Doyle presents in this essay is the lifestyle of the hummingbird. He begins this by describing how fast a hummingbird’s heart beats and how small of a heart they have. However, this is a major portion of the humming birds body and because of this a hummingbird will only live to be two years old. Doyle further supports the idea of a hummingbird’s fast paced lifestyle by providing facts about them such as “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.” (Doyle 95) This shows that hummingbirds live such short lives because they are constantly doing so many things and living in the moment during the short time they have. Because of this however, Doyle writes hummingbirds are not allowed time to relax or to take a break, this is because “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 sludging 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 95) Doyle includes this information in order to show the delicateness of life, especially when a life is lived as quickly as that as a hummingbird. This is supported by the quote “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death” (Doyle 95) which shows just how quickly someone could go from having the time of their life to finding themselves at the lowest point they have ever been. In the end of this paragraph finally introduces a creature other than the hummingbird when he compares its life to that of a tortoise. This is done to show his main point and argument of the first few paragraphs which is that each creature has approximately two billion heartbeats to use in their life time and they can choose how to use them. They could live the short, fast-paced lifestyle of the hummingbird or choose the long, slower-paced lifestyle of the tortoise but only that person can choose how to live their life.

Doyle opens up the latter half of this essay with the description of the animal with the largest heart, the blue whale. He then proceeds to write that while the blue whale is the largest animal in the world we know little to nothing about it. Once the whale reaches a certain age it goes through an unimaginable puberty and from that point all we know is that they travel in pairs. However, from the fact that the blue whales travel in pairs we can tell that they are very loving creatures because they are choosing to spend every day of the rest of their lives with each other. Doyle then goes on to the last, most meaningful paragraph with this, “Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.” (Doyle 96) This lays the basis for the argument he is trying to make which is regardless of the size of the heart, regardless of the creature, there is always something inside which makes us all similar. Doyle continues this thought by saying that we all seek love and believe that one person will come along and love us always. However, we quickly realize this is unrealistic thinking and set up our hearts like an empty house where we sometimes open up the windows to allow sometime in to love or hurt us. While we all accept that this will often lead to pain and heartbreak, we go through with it and will slowly heal over time and then once again continue the process because love is a natural, necessary thing that all people seek for most of their lives.

 Brian Doyle uses the essay Joyas Voladoras in order to show the comparison between the many lifestyles a person can choose such as the short, fast-paced lifestyle of the hummingbird or the long, slow-paced lifestyle of the tortoise. However, he follows this up by stating that each person is in charge of how to live their life and says that everyone should live in the moment because it’s impossible to tell when things could start to go poorly. Doyle then goes on to make his last point by beginning with the quote “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.” (Doyle 96) This perfectly ties together his ideas with a major emphasis on the emotional side of the heart and the fact that it holds so many important memories and emotions that make us who we are. He then finalizes the paper by stating that while we will always be reluctant to let someone else into our hearts, we will always take the risk not knowing if they will hurt us or love us and regardless of what happens our hearts will always repair from the damage and open back up again in hopes of a finding someone to love us or create loving memories.
