What The Scorpion Knows

The scorpion has existed for over 400 million years. It walked the earth before dinosaurs. It has outlived ice ages, asteroid strikes, shifting continents, and nearly every creature that once seemed permanent. When the world becomes inhospitable, the scorpion disappears.

The scorpion will slip underground and enter what biologists call a dormancy-like physiological state. It is not considered true hibernation. It is a strategic withdrawal. Its little scorpion body reduces itself to the absolute minimum required to stay alive. Every unnecessary movement is abandoned. Every resource is conserved. It can go almost a year without eating. It can hold its breath for days.

The scorpion does not exhaust itself trying to survive in impossible conditions. It goes still. It waits. It trusts there will be another season.

Despite this ability for stillness, for waiting, for holding one’s breath, the scorpion possesses another remarkable trait. It fluoresces under ultraviolet light. Even when it is completely dormant. Even when it has gone as deep underground as it can go. Even when it appears, to every outside observer, to be dead.

The scorpion will glow in the dark.

The animal can retreat. But its radiance cannot.

I’ve spent this last month underground. Withdrawn. Still. Waiting. Conserving. Saying no to anything that demanded more than I had to give. Letting unanswered texts remain unanswered. Letting projects wait. Letting silence do what striving could not.

I used to think this kind of stillness was failure. I thought survival was supposed to look like endurance. That it was supposed to manifest like the Energizer Bunny forever beating its drum. Push harder. Do more. Sleep less. Rest when I am dead.

Perhaps this is a profoundly human misunderstanding.

We wear depletion like a medal of honor.

The scorpion has survived hundreds of millions of years without confusing movement for life.

It knows that stillness is not surrender. It knows there are seasons for motion and seasons for disappearance. It knows that conserving energy is not the same thing as giving up.

And while it waits…while it has withdrawn from the world…while it has gone silent…it is still luminous.

The shell keeps catching the light.

How much of my life has been spent trying to manufacture brightness instead of trusting that some things cannot be extinguished? Maybe there is a version of hope that asks nothing of us except to remain alive long enough for the season to change. Maybe hope is simply refusing to mistake dormancy for death. Maybe there is a kind of radiance that survives beneath the striving. One that doesn’t depend on applause or productivity or being seen.

One that can keep glowing even while we’re underground.