A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens will soon be coming to a stage near you, and i highly recommend going to see this Buddhist parable. A few years ago, i thought, Oh, no. Not Christmas Carol again. But our local theater company delightfully reworks this old chestnut every year, bringing more and deeper meaning to it.

To set the stage, so to speak, let’s first glance at the characters. The familiar Scrooge, who in modern-day parlance, represents the “Screw you” approach to life. Scrooge is a stingy man who worships the god of gold. His first name Ebenezer alerts us to the plot because Ebenezer means “stone of help.” Ebenezer Scrooge is a stone who, eventually, does help those around him.

Scrooge’s nephew is named Fred. If we trace Fred’s name back to the German Friedrich, we can easily see that Fred is a peaceful man (Fried). The -rich of Friedric harks back to the German word for ruler. (Think: Reich.) Eventually, Fred’s heartful attitude does come to rule even old Uncle Scrooge.

Tiny Tim lives up to his name, which means “honoring God,” when he utters the closing words of the play “God bless us, every one.”

Have you heard the story about the meditator who goes to talk with her Zen master and says, “I just can’t find the time to meditate.”

The master takes a large jar and fills it with big rocks. “Can i put any more in?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

He takes a handful of gravel and sifts it down between the rocks. “Can i put any more in?”

“No?” she says doubtfully.

He takes a handful of sand and sifts it down between the rocks and the gravel. “Can i put any more in?”

“No,” she says.

He fills the jar with water. “What’s the lesson here?” he asks.

“Well,” she sighs. “I can always fit in one more thing.”

“No,” he says. “Put the big rocks in first.”

What are your big rocks? My big rock is going on retreat. As i approach the end of the year, i’ve just scheduled my retreats for the coming year–3 in March, 1 in May, 2 in July, 1 in September, and 1 in November. Now that that’s settled, i can schedule other important things, like going on vacation with my sweetie, and staying home in April and May (mostly) to garden.

Life will fill up any remaining spaces.

What are your big rocks?

I recently did a five-day study retreat with Culadasa, author of The Mind Illuminated. His very specific meditation instructions reflect his former career as a neuroscientist.

He points out that the five sense doors—seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting—do not communicate with each other, and are only known to each other through the clearinghouse of the conscious mind. Likewise, the unconscious mind, and there are many, many of them, do not communicate with each other.

When I am teaching introductory meditation, I often use the example of the puppy mind. “The puppy mind wanders away.” Our teachers often say “the monkey mind,” but we don’t live in a culture that knows much about monkeys. We think of them as cute rascals, but people in the tropics know them to also be destructive vandals. In this culture, we do know about puppies, so I find “the puppy mind” to be a clearer image, one that opens our hearts to our own self-judgments.

After listening to Culadasa, I realize that it’s not simply “the puppy mind.” There are 101 Dalmations in there! Ninety-nine may be cavorting around. Maybe one is snoozing. But when you catch one puppy fetching mindfulness back to your conscious mind, you want to reward it. Good puppy-mind. Never mind those hundred other wandering puppy-thoughts.

We are training one puppy mind at a time with intention. We start with the intention of mindfulness, and take time to savor and be glad that at least one puppy fetched us back to consciousness.

When we arrived in Yangon, our friend Pwint was at the airport to meet us. She had brought her nephew who hauled our big suitcases into a van and then drove us to Pwint’s condo. For the past few years, i have addressed Christmas cards to Pyay Gardens in Yangon, and now i got to see the address in the flesh: 3 yellow 5-story buildings across the street from the Insein General Hospital.

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