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.
As part of its ongoing Fireside Chats program, the Blackstone Memorial Library welcomes Branford author Jen Payne for a poetry reading on Saturday, March 8, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
In honor of International Women’s Day, Jen will be reading from her new book, Sleeping with Ghosts, focusing on some of the women she’s written about — mentors and muses and friends. After the reading, Jen will be joined by Laura Noe for a conversation about how our relationships with women influence and inspire us. Laura, a local author as well, holds a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, and is currently teaching the Psychology of Women at SCSU. Attendees are welcome to bring a short (100 words or so) introduction about one important woman in your life to share with the group.
Copies of Sleeping with Ghosts will be available for sale during the event. Refreshments will be served.
This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required. The Blackstone Memorial Library is located at 758 Main Street, Branford. For more information, visit http://www.blackstonelibrary.org.
Jen Payne is a poet, author, photographer, and artist. She is inspired by those life moments that move us most — love and loss, joy and disappointment, milestones and turning points. Her writing serves as witness to these in the form of poetry, creative non-fiction, flash fiction and essay. When she is not exploring our connections with one another, she enjoys contemplating our relationships with nature, creativity, spirituality and our inner lives. Ultimately, she believes it is the alchemy of those things that helps us find balance in this frenetic, spinning world.
Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sunspot Literary Journal, The Perch, and the 2024 Connecticut Literary Anthology. She has written five books: Look Up!, Evidence of Flossing, Waiting Out the Storm, Water Under the Bridge, and Sleeping with Ghosts, all of which are available to borrow from the Blackstone Library. They can also be purchased online at 3chairspublishing.com.
“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the 40th annual MLK Breakfast, presented by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Heritage Foundation. It was a beautiful community event that included readings, music, and a presentation by Pulitzer Prize winning author Dr. Jeffrey C. Stewart who spoke about the history and importance of non-violence.
I went at the invitation of my friend Laura Noe, who has her finger on the pulse of activism in truly inspiring ways. She reads voraciously, volunteers liberally throughout town, and knows how to make good connections for others. She’s currently working towards her second Master’s Degree, in Public Health (her first was in Gender Studies), and she’s teaching two courses at Southern Connecticut State University this semester, Psychology of Women and Adolescent Development.
For several years, Laura has recommended I read the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the land, with a focus on the role of plants and botany in both Native American and Western European traditions.
So yesterday afternoon, while the world around us marched to a seemingly different beat, I picked up my beautiful hardcover copy of Braiding Sweetgrass and began to read.
I suspect this was a divinely inspired moment — something somewhere knew it was exactly what I was supposed to be reading yesterday, the odd ironic day in 2025 when we simultaneously honored a great leader like Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurated a demon and his minions.
I wanted to share with you this gorgeous passage from the new Introduction in the 2020 edition…it delivers, I think, beautiful blades of hope.
I began writing Braiding Sweetgrass in what seems, from this moment in the midst of a global pandemic and the upheavals it has generated, a more innocent time, when climate catastrophe was a hot glow on the horizon. We could smell smoke but our home was not yet engulfed in flames. There was guarded optimism for leadership on climate change and justice for land and people, human and otherwise.
A lot has happened since in climate urgency, with the political pain of vile Windigos come to office and all the wounds they have inflicted. I don’t need to say more. This evidence might suggest that the medicine of plant stories has not worked very well to heal our relationships with land and each other. The powerful purveyors of destruction are still in power, the skies darkening. But as always, I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world. Braiding Sweetgrass, I hope, is part of that understory, seeded by many thinkers and doers, filling the seedbank with diverse species, so that when the canopy falls, as it surely will, a new world is already rising. “New” and ancient, with its origins in the Indigenous worldview of right relation between land and people. What the “overstory” of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. It is the prophesied time of the Seventh Fire, a sacred time when the collective remembering transforms the world. A dark time and a time filled with light. We remember the oft-used words of resistance, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. United States: Milkweed Editions, 2020.
Today, the Sleeping with Ghosts WOW! Women on Writing Blog Tour stop features a really thoughtful BOOK REVIEW by Kaecey McCormick:
If you’re ready to take a thoughtful, heartfelt stroll through memory and meaning, Sleeping with Ghosts is absolutely worth your time. Jen’s gentle but honest voice will stay with you long after the last page is turned.
Today, the Sleeping with Ghosts WOW! Women on Writing Blog Tour stop features a BOOK REVIEW by Beverley A Baird:
I would highly recommend Payne’s poetry memoir. Love fills its pages, and the words conjure intriguing images. There are so many special poems that I’m sure you will fall in love with, just as I did. So many lines as well, that you will remember and come back to.
Today’s WOW! Women on Writing Blog Tour stop features a BOOK REVIEW by Shoe’s Seeds & Stories:
These are poems to savor, even when they are heartbreaking, whether Payne is writing about New Hampshire in 1992 (I can picture the hidden meadow of lupines, the strawberry moon, the breathtaking stars), a terminal romance in “The Wrong Impression”, or baking a cake in “Real Plums, Imaginary Cake” (the title is a nod to novelist Mary McCarthy’s quote about writing: “I am putting real plums in an imaginary cake.’) I appreciate that Payne not only writes about lovers but also about friendship, such as in the poems “When the Mania Collapses in On Itself Again” and “Love They Neighbor as Thyself”. I enjoyed meeting the ghosts Payne introduces in the memoir, and I think you will too.
I must confess, it doesn’t surprise me that this is the first time in five years I did not meet my personal reading goal of 50 books. There were long stretches of time in 2020 when sitting still was next to impossible, nevermind tasks that required focus and attention-spans.
Which is not to say I wasn’t reading at all or didn’t have a stack of books at the ready. There was always an active book or two — bookmarks holding my place until I returned — and a patient pile of bookshelf finds, Amazon impulses, and contactless library pick-ups sitting in wait.
At some point, I was able to settle back into a fairly regular reading habit — all 10,466 pages of 40 books according to Goodreads’ annual “My Year in Books” report (see below). At some point, I even slogged through The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt), only because I was determined to read the book before watching the movie.
As usual, my annual accounting of reads is a hodgepodge: old favorites, some young adult novels, poetry, a few lifestyle/inspiration books, and plenty of escapist fiction.
My favorites of the year? Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens), The World That We Knew (Alice Hoffman), and The Conference of the Birds (Ransom Riggs).
My least favorite titles didn’t make the list, because I’ve implemented the Page 29 Rule which gives me permission to put down a book sooner rather than later.
I think it’s funny that I began this long, hard year reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh) and The Book of Speculation (Erika Swyler), and ended with Bryan Washington’s Memorial, about findings oneself at a crossroads.
Aren’t we all at some kind of crossroads, here at the end of 2020?
The good thing is that there will always be books. Come what may, there will always be that patient pile waiting for us, that bookmark holding a sacred space for when we return, the character who grabs our hand and says come with me for a while…and we do.
