Week 3 of Advent for Everyone explores joy, and this poem returns to the kitchen dance from Sunday’s anchor column. Three candles burn now. The room is fuller. And a memory of spinning with a daughter, no music, just laughter, becomes permission to be ridiculous, to let the body remember what the mind keeps forgetting.
🎧 Hear the poem aloud or read at your own pace—whichever speaks to you today.
Third Light
By Scott Tilley
Three candles now. The room has changed, not brighter exactly, but fuller, the way a house sounds different when someone you love walks through the door. My daughter was eight when she pulled me from my chair into the kitchen, no music, no occasion, just her hands in mine and that look, the one that says dance with me or else. I tried to sing something. I have no voice for singing. She didn’t care. We spun until the dog barked, until my back complained, until we were both laughing so hard we had to stop just to breathe. The moment cost nothing. Required nothing. Arrived without announcement and left the same way, except now it lives in a video we watch sometimes, my terrible singing preserved forever, her joy enormous and uncontained. Three candles. Hope, peace, and now this: permission to be ridiculous, to spin in the kitchen, to let the body remember what the mind keeps forgetting: we were made for delight. ~ ~ ~ kitchen dancing light her laughter outlasts the song joy needs no reason
🪞 Poet’s Note
We still have that video. My daughter, now thirteen, rolls her eyes when I play it. But I notice she doesn’t leave the room. Something in her remembers too, not the dance itself, maybe, but the feeling of it. Sometimes we feel joy before we expect it, and it stays longer than we imagined.
✍️ Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today