Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Life

  • Weihnachten

    Die Kirchenglocken haben eine Weile geläutet. Jetzt nicht mehr. Die Leute essen zu Mittag hinter geschlossenen Türen, jeder für sich oder in ganz kleinem Kreis, kein Gesang hörbar. Über die Auen und Felder, die Einsamkeit schwebt wie eine Nebelwolke, saugt alle Gedanken auf. Allein ein Vogel durchsticht das Grau, wie ein Friedenslicht leuchtend.

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  • Heal, heal, heal

    It’s that time of year again, time to crawl under my blanket and set out on pilgrimages of forgetfulness. North of here is the tomb of simple goodness – vandalized. South of here is the mausoleum of easygoing fun – in a pile of rubble. I mourn them both with a solemn bow, angry visitors…

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  • The Heron

    You know you live in a wholesome place when you bump into a grey heron at the employment agency on a sunny December afternoon in Upper Bavaria… and a handful of people stop their errands simply to watch and congregate. All of this on December 1st, the National Day of Romania. It was very calm,…

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  • Quote of the day – On social support and healing

    “(…) safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. (…) Social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling…

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  • Quote of the day – A possible link between Romania’s COVID disaster and its communist past?

    “Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. (…) Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. (…) Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics. (…) They (the masses) do not believe…

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  • The Levee

    a man, a dog and the pond at the bottom of the levee: brown reeds, an egret and a few muted gulls, scattered. winter lurking. a man stopping, crouching, gazing into the distance, holding on to that taut leash for dear life. his eyes across the water weighed down heavy whole with the solitude of…

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  • Freedom

    Night was falling in the coppice-wood, each strand of light threadbare and bluish thinned out into mystery, the path darkened by shadows. The clock in the church tower struck the hour of the owls, something shrieked in the distance and a human shape approached on a bike. I clutched my umbrella with sweaty palms, my…

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  • Discoveries on Via Transilvanica

    Here comes the final act of my adventures through the ancestral hamlets of Cernei Mountains (S-W Romania) this summer, summarized in a travel article slated to appear on liternet.ro on October 11: https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/28115/Andreea-Sepi/Catunele-din-Muntii-Cernei-sau-cum-am-ajuns-sa-batem-Via-Transilvanica-fara-sa-stim.html Only available in Romanian for the time being. But, hopefully, the pictures will speak for themselves. 🙂 Enjoy!

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  • I feed on the unspoken

    You call it this, I call it that, the thingness of a thing is beyond our babbles labels come and go what is truly real is quiet and dark its depths crushing and warm and full of moisture like the savage mouth of an intractable lover. Like love, the world may be screamed, sighed, sucked,…

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  • What language do you dream in?

    The brain is a funny thing. And funny things happen when your brain goes on vacation. I consider myself bilingual (Romanian and English) and I’ve been living in Germany for more than 15 years now, but never would I have thought that the German language would end up infiltrating… my dreams! My dreams, yes. For…

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  • Best of Romania 2021

    “It is said that some Bolsheviks, deeming that a love based on choice and exclusivity was only a prejudice infiltrated by the bourgeois spirit, tried to abolish it, treating love as an instinct, an instinct like all the others, falsely adorned hitherto with a passionate halo. (…)The big mistake was that they thought love resides…

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  • Children saying scary things

    My daughter (10), elated that she got into the class she wanted and avoided the all-girls class: ‘All-girls classes suck!’ Me, naively: ‘Why?’ My studious 10-year-old: ‘Because they’d be all prissy and there’d be no boys to fall in love with.’ Ladies and gentlemen, the main purpose of public schooling, right there… in case there…

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