Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
Photo by NASA
A n d W o n d e r i n g
Humans wonder. That’s what we do. And we find things wondrous. No other life forms do that as far as we know. Lucky us.
These are some things I wonder about.
Some are right here.
Others are out there.
Joyas Voladoras
This gift from my friend Maryse transported me. I hope it does you, too:
From One Long River of Song
By Brian Doyle
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 people 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 summer 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.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. 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 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.
Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: the bearded helmetcrests, and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied starfrontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Sometimes I manage to remember that joyous jewels like this are going on in our convulsive world right this very minute. They do not take into account what the darkest side of humanity is doing to anything, including to itself. Nature’s beauties just are, and that is that.
Thank goodness.