Temenos? What’s that?

10 Days Ago · All posts on Oct 13

Me, the other day after hearing a brief mention of a new-to-me-word on a podcast: “Is there a Greek work, something like (sounds like) tem-in-oss, that has to do with a special protected place of healing, particularly out in nature?”

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You’re likely thinking of temenos (τέμενος), pronounced roughly “TEM-eh-nos.”

In ancient Greek, a temenos was a sacred precinct or sanctuary—a piece of land marked off and dedicated to a god or gods. These were often places of worship and healing, particularly sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius (the god of medicine), where people would go for ritual healing practices.

The term literally means “a piece of land cut off” (from the verb τέμνω, “to cut”). These sacred spaces were set apart from ordinary use, often located in natural settings like groves or near springs, and served as protected places for religious activities, healing rituals, and refuge.

In Jungian psychology, Carl Jung later adopted “temenos” to describe a protected psychological space for inner work and transformation—which connects nicely to the original sense of a sacred, healing precinct.

So much yak shaving even this post

23 Days Ago · All posts on Sep 30

So I was off talking about something, which was in fact a classic example of yak shaving. The person I was talking with is intimately familiar with the term. But in case you are not…

me: There was an old—sesame street maybe?—tv episode from the 70s or early 80s with a song, “There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…” that describes that sort of recursion. Decades earlier than yak shaving.

You’re absolutely right! “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is actually much older than that—it’s a traditional folk song that dates back to at least the 1700s in Germany (as “Lieder von der Zithermädchen”). The English version became popular in the 1800s.

The song became widely known in America in 1961 when Harry Belafonte and Odessa Turner recorded it, and yes, it was performed on various children’s shows including Sesame Street in later years.

The song is the perfect example of circular dependency/yak shaving! The structure is that Henry needs to fix the bucket, but to do that he needs to sharpen the axe, but to sharpen the axe he needs to wet the stone, but to wet the stone he needs water, but to get water he needs… the bucket. It’s an endless loop of prerequisites that circles back to the original problem.

So you’re totally right—this concept of getting stuck in recursive task dependencies has been around in folk culture for centuries! The MIT folks just gave it a modern, absurdist name with “yak shaving.” The bucket song might be one of the earliest comedic explorations of dependency hell.

It’s funny how the same human experience—whether it’s 18th century peasants or 21st century sysadmins—keeps rediscovering this frustrating pattern and finding ways to laugh about it.

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Two-fer from an introduction

September 22 · All posts on Sep 22

I’m currently in the Introduction from Will Stone’s translation of, Montaigne by Stefan Zweig. Two things:

First, a nit about getting the right ideas into our minds when we read. Not a criticism of authors’ (such as Stone) word choices, but rather of our thinking correctly as readers.

Stone quotes Zweig as, “How to keep humanity intact in the throes of bestiality?” Stone’s translation is from 2015, and our current English usage carries sexual connotations. But I had a hunch that Zweig had something like “in the way of beasts” in mind since he was writing in German, in Brazil, in 1941, amidst the global throes of WWII.

It took me just a few moments to get an LLM to show me that Zweig almost certainly wrote «Bestialität»—which in Zweig’s German would have meant brute savagery or barbaric cruelty with no modern (circa 2025) sexual connotation. And in the larger context of the brutality of the war, that connotation makes perfect sense.

Second, further along Stone quotes a vivid metaphor from Zweig relating to suicidal ideation:

[…] always in moments of impotence it emerged, surging powerfully upwards like a dark rock whenever the tide of passions and hopes in his soul ebbed.

Relax; I’m not suicidal. I’m only remarking on the sublime perfection of that metaphor.

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The do-not list

The do-not list

September 22 · All posts on Sep 22

If you’ve not heard of Burkeman’s book (Four Thousand Weeks, I’ve not yet read it) the seed is simple: Your life will be about 4,000 weeks in duration.

In this podcast episode, Burkeman talks about the common advice to prioritize your work and to do the important things first—an echo of Stephen Covey’s metaphor of rocks, pebbles and sand to be put into a jar representing your limited time. Burkeman zooms in on the implication—missed by most people—within Covey’s advice.

You only have finite time. If you have a prioritized list of what’s important to you, it’s the stuff in the middle that will do you in.

Your top 5 items are clearly those big things you should work on. But, your number 6 item—that one feels almost as important as number 5. You need to actively avoid the danger of getting sucked into that number 6 (and the other almost as important items right behind it.)

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Limited time

Limited time

September 20 · All posts on Sep 20

Every 6 months or so I reach the end of another volume in my journaling. At the front of each journal, I write my oath. I use the act of cracking open a new notebook as a prompt to reflect on my journaling process itself.

I reflect on what, and how, I capture things each day. Why am I journaling? Am I seeing longterm trends? Is there any change for better, or for worse?

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Stop and really look

Stop and really look

September 13 · All posts on Sep 13

On a recent trip I found myself with some spare time one morning. I used it to slowly wander through the little hotel’s sitting area. There I found a collection of board games and a couple dozen coffee-table books scattered about. I took the time to thumb through each of them for just a few moments.

This book still held my interest after a few moments and so I applied my page 88 test. When I realized that page 88 was somewhere within a long series of color plates—all of which were interesting to me—I flipped to the Foreword. And then I took a photo of the cover so that I could later snag a copy.

Today, here I am with a copy of the book (bought for $4.95 from AbeBooks). Beyond all of the above and the contents of the book itself, the book is now also imbued with the ambiance of that little hotel and cues up all the memories of that little trip.

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Decisions made

September 9 · All posts on Sep 9

What they couldn’t get right is that leadership isn’t consensus. 

Leadership is standing up and saying, “Ladies, I will be in Cartagena on these dates to celebrate our birthday… by myself if I have to. I hope you can make it.”

Nini Nguyen, from What Leaders Can Learn From Type-A Personalities

I’m not a leader in business, but I would like to be a leader in my life generally.

And this is something I screw up all the time. Note to self.

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Automagic (converter tests)

September 7 · All posts on Sep 7

New toy: code that spots text files in my slipbox and automatically creates WP posts from them.

slip:4uaaai1.

h2 heading

This is a para with italics and some bold, plus inline code_span() and a linebreak at the end.
Like this second visual line in the same paragraph.

Here’s a link to my site and an autolink https://example.org that should pass as plain text.

h3 heading

Unordered list, with nesting:

  • one
  • two
    • two point one
    • two point two
      • two point two point one
  • three

Ordered list, with nesting:

  1. alpha
  2. beta 3. beta.1 4. beta.2
  3. gamma

h4 heading

Fenced code blocks:

<?php
// sample PHP fenced block
$items = ['alpha', 'beta', 'gamma'];
foreach ($items as $i) {
    echo strtoupper($i) . "\n";
}
# generic fenced block without language
line 1
line 2
h5 heading

my blockquoty goodness

~ john doe

my blockquoty goodness

~ john doe

A multi-paragraph quote to ensure wrapping works across paragraphs.

Second paragraph of the same quote, still quoted and should render inside a single quote block.

~ jane smith

Another paragraph after the quotes.