According to Cleveland Clinic “every minute, your heart pumps about five quarts of blood through a system of blood vessels that's over 60,000 miles long.” Your heart is one of the few organs in your body that functions without a break 24/7, working overtime in moments of stress. In his writing “Joyas Volardares,” Brian Doyle discusses the heart of a hummingbird, tortoise, blue whale and human. These are all animals that are extremely different at face value. However, they are similar in that they all have a heart with four chambers, and approximately two billion heartbeats to spare. What is different is what they do with it. According to Doyle, “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 95). Doyle is saying that even though they both have hearts with four chambers and a certain amount of heartbeats a hummingbird and a tortious will use them differently. By examining Doyle’s continuous references to the heart and lifespan one can infer that Doyle’s intention is to stress the importance of health; this is important because his meaning goes deeper than expressing the different lives a person can live. 

Doyle begins his piece by introducing his readers to a hummingbird. He discusses its rapid movements and it’s heart the size of an eraser. Overall, he begins to paint a picture of a hardworking, accomplished creature. However, the hummingbird does not take care of itself. The hummingbird is an analogy for the overburdened, workaholic modern day adult who does not allow themselves time to take care of themselves. Doyle is stressing how physically, everything comes at a price, and in the case of the hummingbird “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysm and rupture more than any other living creature… you burn out. You fry the machine” (Doyle 95). This means that although they are accomplishing more at a faster pay they are paying for it with their health. 

Doyle moves on to discuss the more lethargic actions of a tortoise and a blue whale.

The blue whale bringing the polar opposite of a hummingbird with a heart large enough to harbor a child. Though it is clear that a hummingbird accomplishes much in a day it is also essentially squeezing what a tortoise has in two hundred years into two years which is not something a human should strive for. Living life like a hummingbird will one will burn you out first and is not healthy. This is the person who rushes around and does not allow themselves time to decompress. If someone does not take care of themselves, they will burn out before their slower counterpart. Also, just because the other person or the symbolic whale does not accomplish as much in one day does not mean that what they do doesn’t hold weight. Doyle supports this by writing, “the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles” (Doyle 96). They still have an impact on this world. Doyle uses two extreme animals to more dramatically convey the different lives we all have instead of using humans. His message is so successful because of the tremendous difference in sizes but the one thing that connects us all; our hearts. 

Finally, Doyle concludes his writing by addressing the lives of humans. He writes “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment” (Doyle 97). This is expressing how every little moment counts and you can only have more of these if you take care of your heart. We are alone in life but if we stay healthy we will have the chance to form bonds or open windows to other people and live a better life. A human is given the choice to live life like a hummingbird, or a blue whale. Whatever they choose, they will have to pay the price. 

Brian Doyle uses these different animals to convey that even though we are all given a life and a heart it is only up to us how we spend it. If we choose not to be healthy we will be given less time on this earth even though we may accomplish more in a shorter period. When Doyle compares the hummingbird, blue whale, tortious and even the human he creates a strong link between all of them by saying “No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside” (Doyle 96). However, what makes them different is what they do with their heartbeats. Just because they one spends it differently it doesn’t make it better than the other. His most powerful decision in writing this piece was using different animals to represent different health paths that a person can choose. Doyle closes his piece by writing that “although they are all alike and even connected we are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart” (Doyle 96). No one else can decide whether or not we will be health conscious. In the end “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,” so the least we can do is take care of them physically. 
