Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Heart in the Matter

Megan had posted a clip on her FaceBook:

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. 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." Brian Doyle "Joyas Voladoras"

I had never read before. But just that clip was profound to me...I was thinking...Yep, you need a shell of protection to live to be two hundred years old...God knew what he was doing for sure....

Then David commented:

"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."

And I began to think...I need to read this in it's entirety. Now that I have, I want you to read it also.




Joyas Voladoras

Brian Doyle

FROM THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

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.

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: 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 star-frontlets, 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.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. 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.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It IS a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: 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.

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.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. 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. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that 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. 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


Beautiful...

I was moved to tears as I read, "But we know this: 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."

Traveling in pairs...moaning to each other as they move slowly across their watery world.
It yanks my heartstrings.

 

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Fragile Hearts

 
I'm taking down my Christmas tree...and I must be so careful with these hand blown glass heart ornaments. Last year I broke several. You can actually hold them too tight, they are so fragile. Some have defects, all have different shapes, but still recognizable as a heart. I was texting with one of my children who is having difficulty and requesting prayers for that family. And I'm taking these fragile hearts off the tree...one at a time...like a family tree...of fragile hearts. I'm thinking I'm grateful I can trust my family of fragile hearts...that are a part of my family tree to the creator of the tree...the inspiration for Christmas...and I lay each one gently on the table. My eyes full with tears as I stand back and look...yes, one heart representing each one of my family...even the three new ones added with Craig this year and one for the baby girl coming in the spring. Not one more...not one less. Nothing on my part planned this...and I feel like dancing.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

It Ain't All Gravy, Baby


 


It's a new year...and we’re off….

 

This morning at 6AM, one of my furry house guests woke up vomiting. Just grass…but a rude awakening and several spots to work on. She’s fine, no worries. We all went back to sleep for a bit longer.

Upon awakening, I remembered I had  several pounds of chicken breast that I unthawed yesterday and needed to cook, so before breakfast, I cut them into strips and commenced to frying chicken strips.

And with all the drippings, chicken gravy was a must…but all I had was almond milk, vanilla almond milk. And I wanted to blog about it…More on that later.

Just as I got the dishes ready for the dishwasher, the chicken resting….baha! And the kitchen area wiped off, Daisy came to the door, hanging her head.

Oh, please, no…Daisy. But no such luck…she had rolled in poo poo…and with a big blob of the “stuff” stuck on her neck, very close to her jingle bell collar, stood there hanging her head…”oops, I did it again,” seemed to ooze from her psyche.  

I let her in, of course, scolding her in my most loving voice. I’m not sure why I do that. I didn’t do that for my children as they blundered through childhood. My scolding voice for Daisy seems like a little ole grandma fussing. It’s weird.

 
She went straight to the bathroom. I remembered I had finally cleaned BOTH bathrooms last night.  I was so irritated I called her back out to the front yard and told her she was going to have to deal with the water hose and the cold water. We went outside I hooked up the hose only to find the water inside the hose was frozen and wouldn’t go through. I struggle with trying to unhook it from the spigot, with no success. I have to remember to go back. It was just too chilly in a t-shirt and pj bottoms to be out there wrestling with the hose. I turn toward Daisy and say, “We’re gonna have to do this in the bathroom,” and she gives me a sad, “please make up your mind, Moma; I have this “stuff” hanging off of me.”

So again, I let her in, she heads to the bathroom. (Oh, yeah, the resting chicken…I actually thought to go put it to roost on the frig cause, Lexie can reach just about anything when you aren’t looking).  I tell Daisy to get into the tub. She says, “Please, Moma, no” I commanded again and she complied. It’s such a sad sight to see her climb so slowly into the tub with such dread.

 
By the way, Bishop thought the whole time he wanted in on it, but I’m sure he was confused.
 
 
After all was cleaned up, a load of wet towels started, I sat down to blog…you know from the inspired moments with the almond milk. All the dogs were placed outside, Bishop on his cable… Lexie opted to stay in. Daisy just likes to sun after a bath. As I sat beginning to expand on my thoughts, Lexie decided she wanted out. I let her out Bishop in. Then I sit back down. I see Daisy jump up from sunning. I jump up to make sure she doesn’t run after whatever she barking at and WHALA! Bishop runs out the door like it was planned. Bishop was born to run. He knows no boundaries. He has no limits. Just a few short hours before his masters arrive…he manages to escape.

I put more clothes on, as my Pajama Day is not working out and grabbed a leash. This time I was able to catch him within ten minutes of his escape. He got on the other side of the fence and flipped out. With Lexie, Daisy and me on the other side of the fence, he came to me…surprisingly came to me…I reached through the fence, put the leash on his collar and walked him along the fence, me on one side, Bishop on the other, to the gate…and promptly placed him in his comfy cozy crate. He may stay there until his Moma arrives…but then again the howling is not as easy to tolerate as my strong side thinks.

It’s 1 o’clock …and this and more has transpired. I’m not sure how it happens. I was supposed to have Grace today, too. I hate that she’s sick. But she was better off not being at Mimi’s today. When Ariel told me last night that Grace wouldn’t be coming today cause she wanted to look out for me being that Grace was sick….look out for me…she just had no idea at the time…how Gracie not being here today had really been a good decision.

And now…the real meat of this blog posting (thanks for allowing me to whine about my morning)….

I didn’t want to waste the fried chicken drippings remember? With no milk, I used Almond Milk. Oh, right “vanilla” Almond Milk. It was the smoothest, prettiest chicken gravy. It was screaming for biscuits. I knew the “vanilla” might have been a problem, but I proceeded. I proceeded with the same mindset that I usually do thinking, “This is probably not gonna turn out like I want it to.” I do it in so many life situations. Convincing myself that, “I’ll make it work.”  I continue on a course, even when my gut tells me, the odds are against me. You know, they say, “Your strength is your weakness.” I can attest to this. Tenacious to a fault.

There are some things a person cannot change…no matter how strong they believe they can. This was something I wanted to jot down so I can review later…as well as share. I know I’m not the only one. What looks like gravy, smells like gravy, even shows consistency like gravy might not taste like gravy. In this life lesson, it ain’t “all gravy baby.” And it would be good for me to sink my teeth into this…for this year and the rest of my crazy days.