Joyas Voladoras

 "You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it 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" (Brian Doyle).

My first time reading through this, I did not notice much at all and did not really pay mind to this section. However, when I reread this section I felt like everything just clicked. When the passage began the focus was on hummingbirds. However this passage very quickly became about the heart and then the worth of heart beats. I really loved that Doyle began writing about the worth of every beat and how different animals live out this limit on their life. Then coming back to the section quoted above, the connection of the entire passage is made. I interpreted this section as, no matter how hard a person tries to protect their heart and slow down the heart beats, little events like the ones listed in the section will cause the heart to either start racing or even skip a beat. At the end of the day there is no way to completely protect the heart. This is a passage about fate and destiny. No matter how hard you try there is no full control on your life. I was completely blown away by Doyle's ability to so smoothly transition from hummingbirds to the heart and how there is no complete control over it. In my first reading I was left wondering how I ended up here and was left really confused. However reading through the passage a second time showed the true genius and skill behind Doyle's work.