I don’t know about you, but in a world as jam-packed as ours is with people, action, noise, and “stuff,” I welcome — in fact, I yearn for — times and places of empty space filled only with silence and light.

Here’s a poem that celebrates the “hollowness of the season” we’re in — a hollowness that fills the world “with impossible light, improbable hope.”

What Else
by Carolyn Locke

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost—

this is not a new story …

(Excerpted from The Place We Become. Read the full poem here.)

As the poet suggests, it’s a season that invites us to allow ourselves to be “hollowed,” too — to wait in “the autumn sun” so that our inner emptiness might be filled with light and hope.