Presented for your consideration: One dog. A Chihuahua to be specific, delivered to you in a large, stainless steel bowl.

This is a good dog, a happy dog, well cared for and without fleas. See him wagging his tail? He's warm and content and not the least bit shivery.

We will now proceed to shave the dog

Bzzzzzzzz...

We now have a shaved Chihuahua standing ankle deep in fur, in a large, stainless steel bowl.

Question: Is this creature in the bowl still a dog?

Oops, we apparently trimmed off his tail. He doesn't appear to be bothered by it so we won't tell him.

Still a dog?

Heavens, I just found his ears in the pile of fur. I thought he looked funny.

Still a dog though, right?

Sigh. as it happens our friend is scheduled for a neutering today. Let's not watch, ok?

Snip, snip, snip.

Remarkable. Still happy, if he had a tail he would wag it.

Wait a second, wasn't that THREE snips, what could have... oh dear.

He's missing a leg.

All FOUR legs? How is that possible? Hang on; I'll get a second bowl for all the bits.

So now we have a bowl containing the fur, legs, testicles, ears, tail, left eye, kidney, spleen, and several inches of large intestine of a Chihua... Left eye? And the original bowl containing what's left of the original Chihuahua that still appears to be happy although it's getting difficult to tell at this point.

And my question is: Which bowl contains or does either bowl for that matter contain a dog?

I'll leave it to your imaginations to take this through the next logical sequence of events until you are left with one apparently empty, large, stainless steel bowl and one identical bowl full of Chihuahua parts. And ask you: Where is the dog?

If we put the parts in a blender and turn them into a liquid would we have a dog or dog soup?

We could burn the parts and capture the smoke and fill our bowl with soot and ashes.

Is that a dog?

And if we leave bacteria to decay the soup into earth and scatter that or the ashes under a tree and the tree incorporates those parts into itself where is the dog? (No dogwood jokes please.)

One could argue, there was a dog, the dog is dead, its components returned to the cycle of life.

But where does the dog begin, where does the dog end and what is it about the part in the middle that allows us to recognize and label it a dog? And what about a tree? Or a stone? Or for that matter the chair you are sitting on?

Speaking of chairs; when is a chair a chair? When it's being sat upon? You can put your coffee mug on the chair but does that make it a table? When you sit on a table does it become a chair? If you stand on a chair does it become a ladder? If I took a wooden chair and threw it into a chipper then presented you with the chips in a large stainless steel bowl, would you recognize it as a chair, or a tree, or a Chihuahua?

And if I took you back in time and collected a handful of dust from the formation of the solar system (and if you don't believe in accretion then imagine the handful of dirt right next to the pile of dirt that God picked up and breathed life into to create Adam,) and presented that to you in a large, stainless steel bowl, would you recognize the earth? The blade of grass? The blood of Christ? The seeds of a Bodhi tree? The back half of a mouse left on your doorstep by the cat that isn't a cat yet you call it a cat?

And if everything from trees to rocks to dogs and is essentially the same stuff and is both something and nothing, the alpha and the omega, some impermanent manifestation of stardust; then, what do you want for Christmas?

I would take what's left in the original, apparently empty, large, stainless steel bowl.

Only, that isn't for me to have.

May the divine spark that is within you find joy as it discovers itself in the faces of others around you this holiday season, and throughout the year.