Miracle. All of it.

Posted on by Live & Learn

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.

~ Brian Doyle, from “Joyas Voladoras”

Notes:

  • Photo: Frank Brennan with “Blue whale nursing its calf just off Dana Point” via Orange County Register
  • Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
  • Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

 

31 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  2. Now I am left to wonder what the unimaginable puberty is…
    And, strangely, it is comforting to know we don’t know that much about them. They are left free to be.

  4. Fascinating! I have always found whales to be such mesmerizing creatures…gargantuan and yet so graceful. So large and yet seemingly so gentle. My heart aches every time I hear statistics cited as to how many are left. That we have driven these majestic animals to the brink of extinction distresses me deeply.

      2. I didn’t see this a few days back (about the great loss of Whales)…so cruel, criminal, senseless, horrific…I clicked the link and and saw the top half of the first photo and promptly closed the page. My heart is heavy and my eyes want to forget. So Deplorable.

  7. I recently read that passage and it sure does touch…and I like that man knows little of this Mysterious Gift of the Blue Whale…We don’t have to know everything, conquering all…we just need to be content in knowing the the World Is Full of Miracles & Discovering is a Joy. I am looking forward to and I will be Grateful and Awe Struck when I travel to the shore in a few weeks..we will stand, at times, or sit and marvel at the Orca’s /// You have many share on the beautiful Whales and when I saw this share I remembered one wonderful Whale share, with the word “Immensity”
    https://davidkanigan.com/2015/03/31/i-think-we-shrink-from-the-immensity-of-the-purpose-we-are-here-for/#comments

  9. And here I’ve been, picturing Heaven as fields and meadows and orchards and rivers.. but maybe some of it is like a wild yet safe ocean… ☺️ Or maybe He is.

  11. This info totally overwhelms me – just IMAGINE! Then, I read Lori‘s comment and (hesitantly) overflew your link, and now I‘m sick…. and I wonder once more where has humanity, moral behaviour and decency gone.

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