Week 5 of Advent for Everyone reflects on Inhabiting Presence, the shift from waiting to dwelling now that Christmas has arrived. Today’s poetry captures December 31st—that strange quiet after the celebration ends but before the new year begins. The haibun observes a house returning to its rhythms, finding that what arrived hasn’t left; it has simply settled into the ordinary.
🎧 Hear the poem aloud or read at your own pace—whichever speaks to you today.
December 31st
By Scott Tilley
The garland has started to shed. Small needles appear on the carpet each morning, marking where the season is slowly letting go. The tree lights stay on because no one has decided to unplug them yet, and their glow feels less like celebration now than company. In the kitchen, containers of leftovers have dwindled to the last portions, the ones no one quite wants but no one will throw away. A single candy cane hangs from a branch, overlooked or saved. The house has returned to its ordinary sounds: the refrigerator’s hum, the dog’s nails on tile, the particular silence of rooms where people were gathered and now are not. This is not emptiness. This is what fullness becomes when it settles. What arrived has not departed. It has simply stopped announcing itself and started living here.
morning light finds it— the coffee cup she left here still on the top shelf
🪞 Poet’s Note
I wrote this watching Watson circle his bed three times before lying down in the same spot he’s claimed for years. The house felt different after the visitors left, but not less. Quieter, yes. Emptier, no. The presence we waited for doesn’t vanish when the wrapping paper goes out. It moves into the ordinary moments: the mug still on the shelf, the indent in the couch cushion, the garland shedding its needles one by one. Dwelling isn’t dramatic. It’s noticing what stays.
✍️ Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today