Scene 1
The Noise
Scene 2
Narrator
What are we doing?
And when I say “we,” I mean the royal we.
The universe didn’t ask for us.
It didn’t plan for us.
It didn’t leave a note saying we were expected.
Everything that lets us breathe is balanced on a razor’s edge.
Miss one moment in that chain and none of us show up.
We are not inevitable.
We are an accident that refused to quit.
And now look at us.
Living in the safest slice of history anyone has ever seen.
Surrounded by comforts our ancestors would have mistaken for sorcery.
And still we are miserable, restless, and distracted.
Not because life is cruel.
But because the noise never stops long enough for us to think.
Remember when we told ourselves access to more information would fix us?
How is that working out?
The modern world moves faster than the human nervous system was built to handle.
We are walking around with Paleolithic emotions, inside institutions designed before electricity, while handling technology that behaves like it is auditioning for a creation myth.
Everything demands attention.
Everything wants a reaction.
There is no space to sit with a thought.
No room to let meaning arrive on its own.
I have watched people sprint to answers just to feel correct.
I have heard entire worldviews built out of headlines and adrenaline.
And I have felt the silence that greets any thought that does not fit the approved outline.
Scene 3
Narrator
Modern humans are not fragile because we got weaker.
We are fragile because our nervous systems evolved to survive instability through social regulation, and now we live in a society that overwhelms those systems while removing the consequences that once shaped them.
That tension is not a new disease. It is old wiring under new conditions.
For thousands of years, instability was regulated face to face.
Actions had weight. Consequences arrived quickly.
Now we live inside systems that abstract consequence, delay it, or erase it entirely.
Culture has outpaced biology locally and rapidly.
The brain expects feedback. It does not receive it.
So it generates noise.
What gets lost in that noise is not ritual itself, but shared containment.
Modern life did not remove meaning by accident.
It removed friction.
It removed waiting.
It removed the need for interdependence at small scale.
When survival no longer requires the village, the village dissolves.
What remains is the individual.
Then institutions rush in to manage what communities once held.
The moral high ground fills up fast with people who have never once defended the ground beneath them.
That erosion creates markets.
People pay for therapy because grief has no witness.
Influencers replace elders because wisdom was severed from time.
Death feels unreal because most people have only seen it under fluorescent lights.
The problem is not that something was stolen.
It is that nothing replaced it at the same depth.
As for me, I cannot live like that. I refuse to.
Over the past few years, I have learned that most people are not looking for honesty.
They want comfort, even if it is built on lies, excuses, or illusions.
Accepting that absurd fact freed me from breaking for them.
There are times I feel like I am standing right up against myself, trying to figure out if what I am feeling is clarity or madness.
I feel it scraping at my insides, testing my strength.
I ask myself if peace means anything if I had not known despair first.
All I know is that suffering teaches lessons nothing else will.
Scene 4
Narrator
I do not know the answer.
All I know is I will keep searching, even if it takes me places I would rather not go.
I will keep choosing subjects that take time to digest, because thirty-second judgments feel like eating shit and calling it filet mignon.
Maybe I am just a paradox tied in knots.
Maybe the work is not to untangle it, but to live honestly inside it.
This place, though, does not ask anything of me.
And for that, I am grateful.
I come here when the world gets too loud,
when noise starts sounding like it knows what it is talking about.
This tree does not care what I believe.
It does not ask me to explain myself.
It just stands and lets the noise pass.
Under these crooked branches, I can hear my own thoughts again.
I can feel the difference between a question that is mine
and one I was taught to carry.
I can tell when my chest is tight from fear and when it is tight because something is true.
This is where I remember how to stand in uncertainty without trying to conquer it.
How to listen without reaching for answers.
The stories I tell here are not explanations.
They are what happens when ideas meet consequence.
So I sit.
I breathe.
I let what is not real fall away.
And what remains, I try to live by.
But I did not invent this place.
Someone showed it to me long before I had words for it.
She never called it philosophy.
She never called it meaning.
She just knew where a person could breathe.
And it all started, in my Grandma’s kitchen.
Scene 5
Narrator
It was the safest place I knew.
My grandma was what love is, what it was, and what it always will be.
She was what love looked like when it did not ask for attention.
Unwavering. Relentless in her kindness. So full of life it spilled into the room and settled into you without effort.
She had a way of carrying your sadness without naming it. Turning its weight into something lighter, just by being near.
I remember sitting at her table, my legs swinging above the worn wood floor.
I was too small for the chair. My feet never quite touched.
That kitchen was a sanctuary. The kind of place where the noise of the world stopped at the door and waited outside.
Grandma
Oh sweetheart…
You’re not like the others.
And that’s not a bad thing.
One day, you’ll understand why.
Narrator
Her words settled over me like a blanket.
Back then, I did not know what she meant.
I just knew I felt seen.
Now, sitting under this crooked tree, I think I finally understand what she was trying to give me.
Grandma
At the far edge of the land,
there grew a crooked tree.
It didn’t rise like the tall pines.
Didn’t bother with symmetry or grace.
Its trunk twisted through seasons of wind and weight
shaped not by what it wanted,
but by what it survived.
People passing by shook their heads.
“That tree’ll never be much,”
“What good’s a thing that can’t grow the right way?”
But the tree said nothing.
It just kept growing.
Its roots tunneled deep through stubborn clay and stone
far deeper than the others ever dared to reach.
Then came the storms.
The winds came howling like wolves.
The other trees braced themselves tall, proud, unmoving. Sure of their strength.
They did not bend. They did not yield.
They thought that was power.
But the wind…the wind did not care.
One by one, they broke.
Splintered at the heart.
Uprooted.
Scattered.
When the storm moved on,
the forest was filled with silence and ruin.
But the crooked tree?
Its roots held.
Its body yielded.
It bent.
And it swayed.
It danced with the wind, not against it.
When the sky cleared, it was still standing.
Not because it was the strongest but because it knew how to give
without giving up.
After that, something changed.
Birds came, nesting in the cradle of its curves.
Children climbed it, held safe by limbs that reached back.
When the sun burned, its shade stretched wide and kind.
People began to rest beneath it, some just for a breath…
some for the rest of their days.
Seasons passed. Fences moved. The land forgot some names.
But the crooked tree remained.
Worn. Weathered.
Still holding the memory of every soul who ever found peace beneath its arms.
People will try to tell you how to grow.
They’ll trace your edges with red ink and say:
“Here, fix this.”
“That part’s wrong.”
“Be more like them.”
Don’t listen too hard.
Because what matters isn’t how smooth your shape is, it’s what keeps you standing, when the storm comes.
The world needs crooked trees.
Places that bend and don’t break.
That show strength through action.
Ones that let you be just as you are.
That hold without asking.
You don’t have to be one… but you can learn to find one.
And if you do…make sure you bring others to rest there too.
Now finish your grits and eggs, sugarman.
End Note
Through the same glowing rectangles that erodes our attention and untethers reality, I am offering something simple: a place to think without having to perform for anyone. A reminder that there is still room in this world to sit down and tell the truth without optimizing it.
This is not a sanctuary from the world. It is a vantage point inside it, a place where you can see how absurd the landscape is and still choose to walk through it with intention.
If any part of this episode has echoed in you, then the invitation is simple. Not to be fixed. Not to adopt a philosophy. But to participate in the stubborn and necessary act of remaining human in a world that keeps forgetting what that means.
Under The Crooked Tree is reader supported. I don’t have sponsors. I don’t play the algorithm. Just stories and essays forged from experience. If that sounds like something worth keeping alive, free or paid, your support keeps the axe sharp.
