Much ado is in the air. It is as if I am a green sticky-footed gecko trapped in a white shoebox. I move from wall to wall and then back again. Up, down, over, backward, ceiling, floor, faster, faster. I see no door, and I don’t quite know what I’m getting done, yet I feel the tug and pull to do it now. I am hungry all the time. Unrested. Too full.
Bustling and jumping — verging on, but not quite arriving at frenzy — is much ado. It happens when we’re in an uptick for one reason or another — crisis, celebration, recalibration, preparation, anticipation, dread, fear, loss, worry.
Perhaps the ado is the whirl- mind of sliding into fall with seemingly less time, less strength, less hope and, yet, the same hurry- hang-on-lives of movement and change and got-to, need-to, oh-no, should-have, must.
Perhaps it is schools’ beginning that sets us off. The smell of pencils sharp and wooden, notebook paper and glue, filling the shelves at the stores, the memory of shoes again, tight and binding, after a summer of bare feet on hot concrete, damp mud, sand. Even if it’s been a lifetime, each of us remembers hinderless time, boredom and heat, the heavy gold value of summer, like coins, like wealth, like treasure.
Perhaps it is the shortening of the days, how the sun comes in through the white window slats later by a touch, a feather slip, a notch each morning until we wake to dark and sit bleary eyed in our beds, to stare down the red numbers on the clock. We are like young pups in a curl of fur, suddenly awakened and asked to move, to rise, to rally in the dead of what was, just a blink ago, night.
Perhaps it is an election coming and the cyclonic spin of all that leads up to one nowadays; all the whipping curving winds of argument and obfuscation, the whodunnit high tides of muck and lies we wade through to find our version of what might sound true, or smell true, taste true. Sometimes, barring any other data, we even try to discern what feels true, hoping it may help us this time around. We know we are in the midst of one heck of an effort to muddle through and come out even, or alive. We want to survive somehow.
Perhaps it is none of these things, and in fact, the ado is like the zugunruhe of flight birds, a phenomenon that comes upon them seasonally, unbidden and unstoppable. I first heard the melodic German word defined as seeking calm; it is the beginning of the drive toward migration. When birds experience zugenruhe they first become agitated, restless, jumpy. Some part of their brain clicks on, and their bodies begin to home in on leaving. Fly. Move.
Right now, somewhere, in Colorado, over the prairies and the just-cut fields of the Front Range, are the last of the Swainson’s hawks bird-footing their way through the short stubs, looking for insects. When the bugs leap, the Swainson’s snap down their beaks hard. For weeks, they grow fat on grasshoppers. They are unsettled, full of tug and twitch. Finally, heeding the call of zugunruhe, they take flight.
Soon, somewhere over the Isthmus of Panama between the Central and South America, between Mexico and Colombia, a great funneling of birds will begin. Swainson’s, like a giant locomotive, will paint the sky hawk-colored and dark. They will soar on and on, hundreds and thousands of them, making their way to Argentina.
We remain with unsettled inklings and restlessness, but without a specific destination, without a biological or metaphorical migration. We know we need refreshed resolve and strength to approach the coming days, the disquiet, the constant realignments brought on by national upheaval, crisis and dismay. We have much to drive us, and though we do not take wing, I don’t doubt for a moment, that we feel the restlessness of zugunruhe. We too need to save ourselves from hard winter and the certain death of doing nothing.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at .
