Temenos

Creating my own sacred space →

Published 19 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on Mar 14

I’ve been working on myself a long time— structured prompts, journals going back years, books chosen deliberately. That practice is mine, and it’s working. But there’s something I can’t yet do: Know that Jesse is also in it. Or that Mike showed up this morning and set something down for me. I have no way of feeling I’m not the only one.

I didn’t want a group chat. Group chats are about response and obligation. I post, someone reacts, the thread pulls all of us back in. (Or it gets washed down the screen by all those other messages.) I didn’t want a social network either, with its metrics and its performance. I wanted something closer to what a good café used to be for writers: A place where you showed up, do your own work, and just know that others were there too. The ambient awareness of shared striving. No agenda.

The ephemerality matters. I wanted a space that wasn’t an archive. It’s not for posterity. Posts disappear automatically because the point is showing up now, not curating a record of having shown up. Presence, not pursuit.

I called it Temenos because that’s exactly what it is — a sacred precinct, a piece of ground cut off from ordinary use. Jung used the word for the protected psychological space where transformation happens. That’s the room I wanted to build. Small. Quiet. No notifications. No likes. Just the slow accumulation of people doing the work, leaving a trace, moving on.

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Temenos, part 2 →

Published 13 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Mar 2  ·  

Today one can conduct an interview on the phone or via Skype, but ideally, in order to truly foster reciprocities of rapport and insight in a meeting, one requires a live countenance and a quiet physical space-like the ancient Greek temenos, with its sacred enclosure or holy grove or magic circle— in which an interview can live and flourish.

Jonathan Cott, xiv, from Listening: Interviews, 1970-1989

There’s this word, again!

I’d spotted it previously… and it came to mind during Steve Heatherington’s monthly podcast call. I was reminded of it by his discussion of telic. But I couldn’t exactly remember the the word temenos at first. I am certain I first heard it mentioned in an episode of Boston Blake’s Mythic podcast, but I couldn’t find a reference to a specific episode (on my blog or by searching.) Then I realized the word appears in the Introduction to a terrific book. Which was also literally sitting on my desk… a crazy confluence of events.

When I first encountered it, I’d not thought of it in the context of what we podcast hosts do for our guests. But Cott makes it crystal clear.

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Temenos? What’s that? →

Published October 13  ·  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.