I took a shower and went upstairs, hesitated a moment, knocked on Jake’s door.  He was sitting in bed reading, his little reading spectacles down on his nose.

“I went out and wandered aimlessly for a while, like a lunatic,” he said.  “Now I’m back.”

He was reading Shobogenzo, the great lifetime work of our Zen lineage’s founding teacher, from the thirteenth century.

“How’s the book?” I said.

“As you lose your mind, it almost makes sense.”

from Jake Fades: A novel of impermanence by David Guy