It was an escape of connections — meaning an escape to connections, about connections.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, I re-connected with my college roommate Melissa, mere miles from where we met in Amherst nearly 30 years ago.
Jen and Melissa
After a meal and the start of a conversation that would continue on until morning, we enjoyed an evening with Krishna Das at First Churches of Northampton, a stunning backdrop for a sacred concert of Sanskrit chanting.
Krishna Das, First Churches of Northampton
My breath rises within me, the breath of the heart. The sweet breath. The sacred breath leads me in.
Krishna Das
The next day, a visit with friends Judith and Frank Bruder, and the gift of a conversation that unfolded over six hours—food, books, writers, words (and silence), how we process…how we love. “To me the give-and-take of conversation is the breath of life,” Judith writes on her blog, Touch2Touch, which served as our introduction several years ago. How wonderful its tagline: “Only connect!” Amen.
Jen and Judith
Frank reading one of the first copies of LOOK UP!, Jen’s new book
By definition, an adventure is “an exciting or dangerous experience, an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks.” But I prefer the less foreboding interpretation: “an exciting or remarkable experience.”
With that in mind, I will tell you that one of my recent exploits involved many of the things one might expect to find on an adventure: exotic foods, beautiful scenery, interesting conversation, and a joyful sense of having been someplace new and exciting with good companions.
The place? Western Massachusetts. The adventure? A get-together with my friends Judith and Frank Bruder for dim sum…and then some!
When they heard I’d never had dim sum, they were quick to insist it be included on the iterinary, so off to Oriental Flavor in Amherst we went!
Plate after steaming plate arrived at our table — crystal shrimp dumplings, crispy shrimp balls, pork shu mai, steamed tofu crepes — while we enjoyed a lively conversation about languages, food styles, trying new things and chicken feet.
Thankfully, it was time for dessert! And we happily devoured two delicate egg tarts, and a pair of delicious omochi sticky rice balls filled with lotus paste and fried with seasame seeds.
A ride through beautiful late-spring farmlands on a phenomenal Kodachrome day found us at Flayvors of Cook Farm in Hadley for three scoops of farm fresh ice cream. Chocolate Almond Chip! Black Raspberry Chip! Hadley Grass! What’s Hadley Grass ice cream? A sweet, pale-green concoction made from local, profusely-growing asparagus.
Then it was back to Judith and Frank’s for continued conversations about good books and good writing, good food and good friends.
In her book You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure.”
It was with both curiosity and a spirit of adventure that we ended our day by attempting our first-ever group selfie—here, for your enjoyment!
(To read more about our day, please see Judith’s post “To Touch the Heart.”)
The blogosphere is a pretty amazing place. Consider this: on a regular basis, I open up WordPress, put down in words and pictures a conversation that is on my mind, and hit PUBLISH. Those very steps connect me instantaneously to all of you—my “Followers” and the greater blogging community.
Like that! I hit PUBLISH, and someone in Slovakia is reading about my trip to Cape Cod, and someone in Mongolia is taking a walk with me in the woods of Connecticut!
Like that! We are communicating—you and I and people from at least 100 other countries! Reading, commenting, sharing in the thoughts and ideas we exchange here.
Like that! I am sitting in an Italian pastry shop in Northampton, Massachusetts feasting on decadent, sugary treats with a fellow blogger I feel like I’ve known forever.
Judith and I meet and immediately pick up our conversation where we left off yesterday, although we haven’t seen or spoken with each other since last July. We do this easily, because our blogs are part of our conversation — almost daily.
An assortment of pastries sits on the table, alongside an assortment of topics: technology, writing, books, spirituality, photography, food. It’s no surprise — but a great surprise, at the same time — that she and I find common threads in our thoughts, our interests, and what we want to talk about today. By their very nature, blogs attract like-minded souls, and our tête-à-tête bears witness to that fact.
We immediately come to the agreement that the word “conversation” best fits this synergy that happens between bloggers, and joyfully continue with ours — animated and face-to-face.
We were driving along a road in Western Massachusetts on Sunday when she handed me a word.
“The first time you do something is so special,” she told me me, “the Japanese have a separate word for it…hajimete.”
Hajimete: for the first time.
I love that this word was part of Sunday’s conversation, because Sunday’s conversation was the first time she and I have ever spoken to each other, face to face.
She is the wise and worldly Judith Bruder, author of two wonderful blogs: A View from the Woods and Touch2Touch. We have been sharing words with each other since December 2010, as readers and writers, thinkers and travelers. But Sunday was our first opportunity to meet and continue the conversation in person.
And that we did, from the first open-the-door moment into a sunny, summer afternoon for lunch, a walk in the park, and a Sunday drive past inspiring views.
As the sentences and sidebars unfolded before us in real time, it felt as if we had been doing this forever — sharing our stories, finding similar paths, learning new things from each other. There was a sweet and marked familiarity to the day.
That is the beauty of word-sharing — whether it’s these blog posts or emails, letters or poems, prose or lyrics. Word-sharing does not require physical presence because it comes from the heart. What you share — what we share — connects our spirits wherever and in whatever form we happen to be.
That Judith and I found the opportunity to be live and in-person was a true gift — and a connection I hope will continue here and there.
[ Click here to read more about our visit on Judith’s blog Touch2Touch. ]
• • •
Photo courtesy of Judith’s husband, Frank Bruder, with whom additional, delightful words were shared.
We are “talking” about enlightenment this morning. It is barely 10:00 a.m., and our talk evolves as pieces of thought shared in a comment field of my friend Judith Bruder’s blog.
“Are we, every one of us, capable of extraordinary beauty, and wisdom, and kindness—if only we realized it?” she asks. “Is that, perhaps, what enlightenment ultimately is—realization of the oneness and infiniteness of everything, including ourselves?”
“I believe we are,” I say, “but there are so many distractions between here and “realized.” I suspect enlightenment needs great expanses of quiet, reflection and disconnection in order to take root and flourish.”
Another friend, this morning, is talking about Thoreau and our important and necessary connection with nature as a source of joy.
But a cicada interrupts my thoughts as I read her words, and I glance up and notice how the morning sun dapples the grass outside the window. I suspect I have not looked up from this whirring machine since the yard was shadowed in last night’s dreams.
This is not the disconnection to which I was referring.
Twenty minutes later, I am in the woods, walking a path I have not explored since summer set upon us with its mid-July ferocity.
When I left the house, I imagined immediate connection here—to pick up where we left off in June, with quiet observation and reflection.
But there are bugs. Lots of bugs.
I have visited with the metaphor of these bugs before—as pesky as my thoughts, as persistent as my worries, as distracting as life’s picayune interruptions.
With the incessant buzzing about my head, how I am ever to find that cherished space and quiet I was seeking?
“Fine,” I say out loud, in surrender to the swarm of gnats. And pay attention, instead, to the rhythm of my swatting—two hands at first in a ballet above my head, then alternating them, left and right.
I walk this way for close to an hour—hands like a windmill through a pine forest into a warm sunny meadow and up to the clearing where the woodpecker sings. At the footbridge, I watch two dragonflies dance, then walk carefully up the rocky slope and down to where the stream crosses the path.
I walk fast, in that way we do when we have a goal to obtain. Oblivious, eye on the prize. All the while swatting with noble attempts to ignore and tune out the…damn…bugs?
Where are the bugs?
Suddenly, they are gone.
I stop and breathe deeply to slow my pace. My arms rest at my sides, and I can feel a hint of coolness about my body. The path is quiet—except for a faint call of a Warbler off in the distance.
Just then, a wide band of sunlight pushes its way though the treecover and lights up the forest around me, until it sparkles and I weep.
“I think perhaps rooting and flourishing happens in cherishing the significant flash,” my friend responds on her blog. “In short — once my long blindness lifts, SEEING simply follows.”
My friend Judith Bruder and I met on the internet many years ago, back in the early days of blogging, when WordPress was coming of age, and Julie was cooking Julia. I had just started my blog, Random Acts of Writing, and Judith was posting at Touch 2 Touch/A View from the Woods with the E.M. Forster quote as her tagline: “Only Connect!” We liked each other’s posts, commented now and then, remarked on shared interests in writing, food, and France.
But it was her frequent photoblogs about Look Park in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts that sparked my curiosity one summer, and we agreed to meet in person. One visit begot another. There were long conversations at her dining room table. Visits to local museums and restaurants. Cooking lessons. Celebrations. Consolations. We weathered milestones, heartbreaks, and the entirety of the pandemic.
It was during the pandemic that Judith came up with the brilliant idea to start a podcast. As she explained it:
“I knew that for me, the physical danger was less than another danger, the death of the spark which is the beating heart of the life force. That’s what had kept me young and vital until 85, my age when the world stopped. I had to find something that could keep the me that really counted, my spirit, my life force, alive.”
Her podcasts, called From My Button Box, kept her, me, and her varied listeners engaged and thriving through the roller coaster months of 2020.
In 2023, I had the privilege of helping my friend turn those podcasts into her third published book, From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time. Published by Three Chairs Publishing, it’s a collection of her favorite podcasts, presented in a unique hybrid format: read the essays or listen to the original podcasts using individual QR codes throughout the book.
It’s a collection I’ve turned to often in the past week since my dear friend passed away on August 26, 2026. Reading her wise words and hearing her voice brings me as much comfort in my grief today, as it has over the past 15 years of our friendship.
Judith was a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who had been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she was a wife then widow, mother, grandmother, and proud great grandmother. She considered herself a freelance philosopher and a modern-day anchoress. She was a wise and steadfast friend to many, and those of us who knew her were truly blessed.
She will be missed and remembered.
Please stayed tuned for a series of blog reposts from Judith and my early blog connections, reposting here in Random Acts of Writing in the coming week.
I am very excited to participating in my second WOW! Women on Writing Blog Tour!
For four weeks in October and November, Sleeping with Ghosts will be featured on close to two dozen blogs and websites across the country with book reviews, guest posts, book giveaways, spotlights, and interviews.
It all starts on Monday, October 14 with an interview on the Women on Writing blog The Muffin. I hope you’ll follow along!
WOW! Women on Writing is a global organization, designed to support women’s creativity, energy, blood, sweat and tears, throughout all stages of the writing process.
Its concept is unique, as it fills in the missing gap between writing websites and women’s magazines. WOW! is dedicated to raising the overall standards within the writing community, and devote an active profile within writing industry associations, organizations and websites.
They actively contribute to the love, enjoyment and excitement of producing quality writing — so that the reader in all of us will never want for good material, in any form.
Twelve pop art Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud to celebrate TWELVE YEARS of blog posts here on Random Acts of Writing. Thank you for your ongoing attention, support, and likes.
“In a time of destruction,” say author Maxine Hong Kingston, “create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.”
