Dances with Scorpions: Killers of Complacency TPS-0049

Only a couple hours after the sun went down, I was celebrating the launch of a somewhat sophisticated attempt at just building a very foundational video game.

I was enjoying one of the first very warm nights after a very hot day since the winter and as I like to do, enjoy some what now is a rosemary infused mead beverage that is the new national beverage of my land from here until further notice.

I'm gonna have to do some research on it, but it's having some amazing effects on my dream life and my sleep life, having a glass of mead at the end of the day and earning it by putting in long shifts of coding.

Sometimes when the summer gets really hot, that glass of mead every night, it's the only thing they can get me to sleep, because it's almost too hot to fall asleep.

But luckily it has not turned into a monster and taken over my life, I keep it in moderation. I hate nausea. I hate the spins, I drink a ratio of two or three to one water to alcoholic beverage to keep the hydration level up. It's worked out well for me, I don't let myself get really tipsy.

I just get into the zone of feeling emotions more deeply.

I don't get myself drunk but I'm definitely more on a sentimental not aggressive type of relationship with this medicine.

I got a little bit of a dance floor environment going on. That's part of my wellness practice, combative dancing, martial arts, kung fu, yoga, ecstatic dance mix that gets expressed to ecstatic trance music. That's what got me this far over a number of years.

So as I'm doing that, obviously the martial arts spirit of it is that you're not just failing around without purpose, but you're actually doing maintenance work on rotation of the joints and moving chi and moving energy across the fulcrums and working on body mechanics and footwork and balance and all those patterns and drills. And, of course, situational awareness can never be drilled too much.

So out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something in the shadows, scurrying.

I've got to a point now where it's not one hundred percent reliable, but it's more keen than ever, anything out of the ordinary in my field of vision, I've become very attuned to even one little pixel out of the entire panoramic landscape of something flickering.

I'll want to identify with binoculars over yonder, whether it's a friend or foe, or just, like the other day, one of those metallic mylar balloons, very out of the ordinary and catching light. So I have a little drill for identifying that.

But being this remote and this exposed, those situational awareness antenna kind of grow themselves. So certainly this is earlier in the season for me to be concerned, typically, so far over the last couple of years, about scorpions.

From my experience and from my research, it's deeper in the hot summer nights that they'll come out of the ground to be hunting.

I've certainly had those encounters before. The only time I saw one during the day out here was when it got trapped in one of my soup cans that was out, and I had to escort it a safe distance away.

That was my first encounter with these larger ones, they're about the size of your hand, they have the span of that at full span.

But it was unseasonably early, I saw it scurrying around in the corner of my eye, I immediately had that adrenalized spike and jumped onto my little mini deck and had to think about it.

First, I grabbed one of my lights to follow it a bit and identify it from a safe distance. I went within a couple of feet to grab the light, then angled it and maneuvered in a way that I could identify it. I was still able to do this footwork that Bruce Lee teaches from fencing, galloping sideways footwork position to where I could get to safety.

It was moving fast, and it had a bigger shadow than the other sort of faux scorpion, the camel spider that's freaked me out before.

It was surprising and shocking, not something that I was at this date being too worried about.

Then, of course, what I'm pondering is just how moments before, in my winter complacency about them being underground and not being anything to think or worry about, that my ankles were just like hanging off my little deck and my feet on the ground with no cognizance to the fact that the scorpion was just a few few away.

A potentially deadly and certainly extremely excruciatingly painful, and potentially being an instigator of a chain of events that could easily lead to death out here in this environment if the sting itself does not kill me or cause extreme irreparable damage at different levels of biochemistry and organ damage.

Even the idea that I could lose consciousness from that sting, that I could act erratically, defensively in order to avoid it in a way that causes me to be injured, in a way that cause me to lose consciousness.

If I lose consciousness out here, I will come to, probably already half dead from being eaten alive by all kinds of things.

It has been a mission priority not to stumble, fall, lose consciousness, suffer heat stroke...There have been close calls so I have had to really drastically adapt life to that reality and it gets acute in the hotter months.

I can be a bit less worried in colder months. It doesn't ever really get to deadly cold temperatures and I'm always bundled up anyway. I like the notion that in cold weather you should be wearing enough layers of clothing that you're comfortable sleeping in them even without a blanket.

Ideally your vehicle would always have all those preps. Though if you have to displace from the vehicle and nap after walking, just the idea of being self contained in that way...

So with all that said, I was just sitting there on my little deck contemplating how my ankles and feet were exposed down there, and I would not be thinking about it.

I always think about this gradient between the seasons, he first annual new, warm season siting of a scorpion, it's always a complacency check, and there's really no clear line.

Even if it made sense to, by a certain calendar date live by a schedule where I'm gonna just start wearing boots at all time...Those boots, they're not real natural, They're not real normal. They're not conducive to the best posture and dynamics overall.

They wear out, they wear out the feet, they degrade hygiene.

I've worked my boots in, they're ready to be put in use if I have to evacuate, but I'm not gonna put them on every time I walk around anywhere in the day or night.

I'm gonna wanna just be hyper aware. So it becomes a very interesting dances with scorpions kind of scenario.

After contemplating for a few minutes, I think, well, that shift has begun, and that innocence has been shattered for this season.

I will never have there be a dark, looming question mark. Wherever my feet are situated, I'm gonna be situationally aware of every place that is hidden from view as I move along anywhere.

And when I do anything close to the ground, you never know because you can be disturbing them from where they are underground during the day. Then they're gonna be that much less thrilled to encounter you if you disturb them, sort of force them out of their comfortable position during the day.

So everything changes and it's a very interesting training tool.

So psychologically, I guess it's become a tradition, or now it's certainly a ceremonial phenomenon for me that well, once that factor has returned, I have to be considerate. Because for me, I'm outside of that golden hour of medical first response, and I'm alone. So that is a mortal combat kind of level of a relationship.

It's a dance with fate, because if I'm not aware of my surroundings, and most importantly, aware of this factor, this formula, that is the speed of advance of your enemy and the number of seconds that go by since you last took a snapshot of every direction, every angle of attack around you.

Whatever tradition of martial arts or science or military training that you've studied, those sort of angles, once you do feel like you may be experiencing some form of a threat around that 360 degree clockwork of what's going on at your six if you have nobody watching it so to speak…

I get back out on the dance floor and I go, this is a very heightened awareness alert state of adrenalized, combative practice dancing, because there's a scorpion literally lurking in the shadows within a few feet of where I am.

There are plenty of places for it to hide, I saw it scurry back and forth from underneath the deck area to back out near where I was.

I'm not trying to be bravado, I'm dancing with this notion of not over compensating with wearing giant combat boots...which still, if you're not paying attention, they'll walk right up onto them and be at a point where they'll have enough reach to get past where you're protected from them anyway.

And there's all kinds of different ones with different climbing capabilities and whatnot from my studies. I'm knocking on bamboo on this one that so far I have not seen the kind that are notorious for climbing and being very ninja like, the ones that I have observed so far out here are the ones that that typically are not known to climb and to embed themselves in places you really not want them to.

So at that ground level, what I've done since that ceremonial reintroduction, it taught me a few things.

That scorpion encounter this time got me back on that platform for the duration of my intoxicated ceremonial experience. After a bit of dancing and practicing my scanning techniques under pressure, I said, okay, I proved the point. I made the ceremonial gesture. I experienced the dancing and the need to be moving, the dance movement and the pivoting of the dance.

These combative movements are not just going through the motions. They're very, literally mortal combat tactical at that point. Because I get that sense of, the clock ticking every time I'm facing one direction and being aware of what is not within my blind spot, to where I have to pivot to be able to cover that, and then then the clock ticks again. I gotta pivot back. So it's very useful, but can be very fatiguing.

I was happy to get back on that deck with reasonable assurance that it was not gonna find its way up to where I was.

There must be a word for it, that sort of pseudo temporary phobia, where you get the creepy qualities, and everything you look at, takes on the shape of the arachnid form and you feel your skin crawling, and you bump into anything…

It's this completely all encompassing, primal evolutionary state. For some people it is full on panic, but obviously you have to train through that.

So I'm there, going through that phase, and then realizing, I never felt so grateful that I had this little deck that I built and is the humblest, tiniest, tiny home, little deck thingy, kind of like a little porch pier thing that I get to post up on. I never enjoyed it so much. Now I'm dancing from the waist up and smiling, realizing, I should be doing more of these type of movements on this thing, it's perfect for it.

I start doing a little bit more stretching, so the scorpion induced me to do more yoga posturing in the morning, thankfully. That's been a gift.

It was a reminder to kill that complacency, every year I'm gonna go through this, and every year it's gonna be a different, probably a different scorpion, at a different moment, in a different context, that's going to burst that winter bubble of complacency.

I just have to hope and pray, it doesn't take a catastrophic form.

This encounter could have been the death of complacency and the death of me. So I always have to live in that fear, it's humbling.

It's a deeply striking, moving, shift in consciousness.

I like to feel small out here in the wild.

My ego and my sense of wherewithal...humbled by these elements and these creatures.

It's the appropriate size of a human ego, to be constantly kept in check by these elements and these creatures.

I really appreciate it and I think it says a lot about how far out of balance human civilization has gotten to where individually and collectively, all this hubris towards the wild, we feel it's easily tamable and controllable.

Then when you humble yourself to it, or it humbles you, you realize it's a better life. Because I would rather be adrenalized by that encounter with a scorpion and make a beautiful ceremonial dance out of it, and have it be integrated into this natural fabric of my own culture of rewilding, then have that adrenalization be from getting lit up by being pulled over or having somebody accost me at a gas station. All the things out there in zombie land that I don't care to be adrenalized by anymore.

I wanna be in a mindset where I'm doing more training for real natural threats then training for all the things that happen back in the urban survival paradigm.

So I'll be raising a glass to the scorpion that did not kill me.

I'll be living in respect and humility towards the scorpion nation.