The tardigrade—or wasserbär—is a little bastard of a microbe, and I have spent the past three days trying to track one down in one of the two petri dish samples I collected. Perhaps it is safe to say that I have failed as a pseudo-scientist. The writer has fooled no one and it is time to put the microscope away. I don’t know where I went wrong; I scraped off several moss specimens from various locations and appropriately drenched them in distilled water. The closest thing I got to a wasserbär was an amoeba, scurrying around in the water, laughing at me. Maybe this is the wrong altitude for tardigrades. This is what I’ll keep telling myself.

But tardigrades, fearless survivors having at least graced our planet since the Cambrian age, are truly made in God’s image. There He sits up upon His heavenly cloud, not exactly watching down on us since he is one of the varieties of Tardigrada that lack eyes. He moves His six stubby legs, and an extra pair of dumpy back limbs, in excitement; for even if He cannot see He can surely sense the rocket His children have sent from the planet Terra on their way to the smaller Luna, a batch of Homo sapiens hitching a ride as well. But humans are weak, they exhibit no abilities in the process of diapause, a form of dormancy initiated and controlled by the organism in question.

I am drawn to the process of cryptobiosis, a form of diapause where your metabolism slows to such a crawl that it can’t even be measured. You literally curl into a ball, a Tun, and wait life out as the hydration in your body quietly converts to trehalose (two sugars joined together, with a molecule of water being removed). Inside a Tun you are almost invincible. Even time has difficulty reaching you (this must be why God is eternal, He spends most of His time curled up on His cloud, converting Himself to sugar). The Tun can survive dehydration, extreme pressures, the vacuum of space and cosmic radiation, heartbreak; who wouldn’t want to live in a state of cryptobiosis? What pure bliss God and the other tardigrades must have, hiding away from life’s countless miseries.

But on a more positive note, via my dearest friend Jacob Earl…