This poem comes from my friend and colleague, Michelle Hargrave, who exercises the spiritual discipline of writing a new Christmas poem every year.

I love this poem because while culture seems to celebrate this time of year with abundance and fullness it speaks to the empty spaces and the place for mystery and absence. These are places of use, as Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching:

The thirty spokes unite in the one center; but it is on the empty space for the axle that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out from the walls to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space that its use depends. Therefore, whatever has being is profitable, but what does not have being can be put to use.