Under the Broom Tree

There was a moment when I didn’t want anything dramatic.
I didn’t want to disappear.
I didn’t want to give up on life.

I just wanted to stop holding everything together.

I had finished something I was good at. Something that mattered. Something that took a lot out of me. From the outside, it looked like competence and endurance. From the inside, it felt like being tired in a way that sleep alone doesn’t fix.

Leaving that role carried more grief than I expected. Not because it was wrong to leave—but because it had shaped me. I knew how to do it. I was reliable there. I was useful there. And when that ended, there was a quiet unraveling I didn’t immediately name as grief.

I didn’t collapse.
I didn’t fall apart.
I just felt… done.

There’s a story in the Bible about the prophet Elijah that I’ve shared before with someone I love who is grieving. I didn’t realize at the time how much of it belonged to me too.

After a long stretch of doing what he was called to do—after being visible, effective, and brave—Elijah finds himself sitting under a broom tree. He asks to be done. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a performative way. Just in a small, honest one.

What’s often missed in that story is what happens next.

Elijah isn’t corrected.
He isn’t given a new assignment.
He isn’t told to try harder or believe better.

He’s given food.
He’s allowed to sleep.
He’s left alone under the shade.

Only later—after rest, after nourishment, after his body settles—does meaning return. And when it does, it arrives quietly.

That detail matters to me.

Because before retirement was even a viable option—before I had language for this kind of ending—something else appeared in my life. A small, soft creature I made with a simple phrase stitched into him:

Then I did the hard thing… so I took a nap.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Thenso was telling the truth my body already knew. That rest didn’t need to be earned forever. That effort could have an ending. That gentleness could follow courage.

I wasn’t asking to be rescued.
I was asking to be allowed to rest.

There is grief in endings we choose, even when they are right. There is grief in leaving a post you were good at. There is grief in no longer being needed in the same way. And there is grief in realizing how much strength you’ve been quietly spending just to stay upright.

This season has asked me to lay some things down without immediately replacing them. To rest without explaining. To create without proving. To listen before deciding what comes next.

That’s where Weird to the Wise is beginning—not as a push forward, but as a settling in. A quieter pace. A different measure of enough. A trust that what comes next doesn’t need to be forced to be real.

I didn’t crawl under the broom tree because I wanted to disappear.
I crawled there because I needed shade.

And I’m learning that rest isn’t the opposite of purpose.
Sometimes it’s the place where purpose finally feels safe enough to speak.