"Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten
times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A
hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, 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."
In this short, dazzling essay, the late writer Brian Doyle pays homage to
life's fragility, magnificence and interconnectedness.
