The Slow Way: Hummingbird Heart

The wise among understand we can’t be the hummingbird without a cost to the heart. We only get two billion heartbeats. We can hummingbird them, or tortoise them.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Growing up, I only saw hummingbirds two or three times a year when I went to the mountains in New Mexico or Colorado to camp. My mom says my first camping trip as a baby I wore a red bandana on my head, which a hummingbird took to be nectar. It came for me with delight and zoomed straight into my head until I wept. I’ve always taken that to mean that the hummingbird is my Official Life Bird. They mesmerize me—their hum and their choice to drink rather than eat their food, to zip through the world on super speed, rather than hop or soar. There’s nothing like them.

In Found, I wrote about a time of prayer when I opened my eyes to find, for one brief and terrifyingly beautiful moment, a beady eyed hummingbird staring right back at me. (A message from God? A hello from my friend from my first camping trip? We’ll never know.)

When we moved to San Francisco, I couldn’t believe that there, in the middle of a city, were hummingbirds, buzzing around the gardens and the local parks. The hummingbirds weren’t elusive like I’d known them in the unpopulated spaces of the mountains. There they were living among the people. One year for Mother’s Day, my tiny kids bought me a hummingbird feeder that I did my best to fill and keep clean, until our backyard’s overwhelming ant population had its way with the sugar water, and I laid the dream to rest. And still, even without getting to enjoy daily sightings in my backyard, I savored every contact with my official life bird. Every quick glimpse and buzzed moment in the corner of my eye. 

In Brian Doyle’s essay “Joyas Vladoras” in his collection One Long River of Song, he says that a hummingbird visits a thousand flowers a day, can fly more than a five hundred miles without pausing to rest. He writes, “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….Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You 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.”

Well. Shoot. 

I can’t stop thinking about that. I know this is called the slow way, so I’m supposed to say something now about the glory of the tortoise and his slow heartbeats and his two hundred years, but there is something magical about the flash of color in the hummingbird — their two billion heartbeats spent in the course of two years. The engine inside them overheating before it's barely begun. Who wants to be a tortoise?

I’ve lived back on the East coast for three years now (which feels impossible, by the way), where there are no hummingbirds. None. If I sat out my old feeder full of sugar water, the ants would show up, but no magic birds. The only pollinators zooming my garden are the insect variety. 

But I keep thinking about those tiny fibrous hearts inside those small, miraculous birds, my infant head covered in the red bandana mistaken for a flower 43 summers ago. The 21 generations of hummingbirds that have lived since the one I first met that day. 

And what do we make of all that speed? Of course, this is a world of speed. Speed is our culture’s language, not just a social norm, but an actual moral “good”. Make it a “life hack” and you’re helping people. Speed up the process and the economy improves. Efficiency is all braided up with moral goodness.

Except for the heartbeat. Because I will always want to choose the hummingbird over the tortoise. She will always be the most colorful, the most elusive, the sweetest. The buzz of her passing by leaving an after-effect that tingles my skin. There’s such beauty in that. 

And our culture with its obsession with quickness, its race to the next thing, will always be the hummingbird as long as it continues along the path of progress. There’s beauty in that too.

It’s just that the wise among us need to understand we can’t be the hummingbird without a cost to the heart. We only get two billion heartbeats. We can hummingbird them, or tortoise them. The faster we zoom, the more our souls—our engines—burn. That doesn't always have to be a terrible thing. But it does matter. 

Of course we get to be human. Sixty heartbeats per minute. One hundred thousand heartbeats per day. We’re not the hummingbird. We’re not the tortoise either. We’re here in the middle, living in the in-between, choosing the kind of speed—heartbeat— we want to hold as ours. 

And what we choose matters. 

A Slow Practice

Our slow practice around here is always a practice of tortoising in a hummingbird-world. And that’s what we’ll do today, paying particular attention to slowing our heartbeat in the presence of the Spirit. 

Our prayer practice today is known as a Prayer of Presence, and it is a practice akin to meditation in the Christian tradition. I’m using Marjorie J. Thompson’s Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life (the first book I ever read on contemplative prayer twenty years ago!) as a guide. 

First find a posture where you can be both alert and comfortable. (Sitting with your neck and spine aligned tends to help.) As we usually do, start by breathing deeply several times. As you breathe, do your best to release any tension in your body. If you’ve been hummingbirding for long, it might take you a bit to notice how tense you are. Give yourself some time.

Breathe in peace. Breathe out tightness, anxiety, or maybe the long list of to-dos that are ticking through your mind. Each breath in is a chance to replace the ticking list with peace. 

As you breathe, begin to think about relaxing your mind. It helps me to bring one hand to my head and hold it there as a physical reminder. If a particular thought keeps returning, imagine your hand gathering it up and handing it to the Spirit. Over and over. Allow God to hold it for you during this time. As Thompson writes, you can take those thoughts back later if you want. 

You can take your other hand and place it on your heart and feel your heartbeat. Think of that hummingbird, and as you breathe slowly, imagine your hummingbird heart slowing to a gentle, peaceful rhythm. You don’t have to carry the burden of speed right now. You can release that pressure. 

Now, if you want (and if your arm reaching up to your head is aching!), bring your other hand to your heart, or place them both in on your lap. Whatever is most comfortable for you. And turn your attention to the presence of God. This can feel like a very intimidating task. What are you supposed to think about? What does it mean to attend to the presence of God? I think we are all different, and we can get hung up on how to engage in this particular sort of prayer. Do we imagine a Person? Do we imagine a feeling? Do we imagine words? 

I encourage you not to focus on any Person-in-the-Sky images. Not to try to FEEL something. But simply come back to breathing and paying attention. Breathe in peace. Breathe out tension. You are attending to a God who is Love. Not an image. Not a prescription. Not a feeling. The point of this practice is not to walk away with an epiphany, so you can let yourself release that need with your exhale. It is enough to believe that God, the Spirit of Divine Love, is here with you. Attending to you, slowing your heartbeat, beside you. 

Your job right now is to let yourself be loved, held, and calmed. That’s all. Stay in this moment as long as feels doable. This is a practice you can do every day. You can set a timer and extend it each day until sitting comes easier. 

When you’re ready, close your time by thanking God for any good thing you received during this time.