This is Bettina’s Newsletter, Heaven and Earth Dispatches. This is where I publish my dispatches about life and travels on this planet. I’m interested in many things, but especially being torn between the heavens and the earth and all that that entails. Also, Berlin stuff.
Who is Bettina?
In my life, I’ve been referred to as “crazy aunt Bettina,” or “traveling Betty,” and it’s true. I have countless stories and an eye for how things differ from here to there and in between. Not everyone can take a year off to study Persian in Tajikistan, but I did! Not everyone served enlisted in the US Army at the height of the American war in Iraq or spent three years studying theology in southern Germany—but I did.
My last full-time job in the defense industry gave me the title “Senior Intelligence Analyst.” I felt a little sheepish handing out those business cards because I wasn’t even 40 years old. Now that I’m more senior, I’ll take on the label again as I continue to use my brain to figure stuff out, but as a freelance and free-spirit writer.
I am a Berlin-based writer and translator. My creative work has appeared in The War Horse, Stadtsprachen Magazin, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and elsewhere.
In my writings published here, I draw on my various life experiences, travels, and studies to bring you dispatches from worlds you may never explore. But don’t have to—I’ll give you a sense of what’s happening in Berlin or how America looks from this far away and explore how, despite us living in the age of reason, people still seek spirituality and connection with super-sensible worlds. What’s up with that?
I am interested in connection and cognition. I want to know who people are and why they do what they do. So yes, this newsletter might cover a lot of territory. Subscribe to find out where it goes.
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Where else can you find me?
Contact: bettinarolyn@gmail.com
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PS. I also run the Substack, Berlin Literary Events, which is a monthly roundup of classes, open mics, readings, and the like in English. Check it out and spread the word.
