Stay & Build Saturdays
Thinking in public about systems, place, and what it means to stay.
Stay & Build Saturdays is a place for unfinished thinking. It’s where Denise works in public—naming patterns, surfacing tensions, and testing ideas as she makes sense of complex systems and local realities.
When ideas settle and patterns become clearer, some of that thinking is carried forward into longer-form essays. You can explore those perspectives in Thinking in Public, where we share viewpoints that continue to shape how we see the world and how we work.
What This Is
A public record of how one person is making sense of systems, place, and possibility—in real time.
You’ll find observations, questions, and occasional experiments that didn’t work the way I expected. What I’m Thinking About Lately appears when there’s something still forming, and those reflections are often shared through the Stay & Build Saturdays newsletter.
What I’m Thinking About Lately
December 2025
12/20/2025 — I went down a rabbit hole today learning about the Beguines. There’s a clear stay & build pattern there that I want to spend more time with.
I’m struck by how groups of women in the Middle Ages created housing clustered around shared space, community rhythm, and meaningful work—outside the control of husbands or the church, which were effectively the only two sanctioned paths at the time. They could support themselves. They could govern their own lives. And importantly, they were free to leave.
It wasn’t rebellion so much as a third option—a refusal to accept a false binary.
That has me wondering where similar false binaries show up in today’s “wicked” problems. Where do we act as if there are only two choices, when a third path might exist if we slowed down enough to explore it?
What’s one small experiment that could help surface those alternatives?
What I’m Exploring or Testing
Right now I’m experimenting with small, recurring conversations as a way to surface constraints before proposing solutions—both inside organizations and in local community work.
Stay & Build Saturdays (Newsletter)
A weekly-ish companion to this thinking. We don’t run public comments on the site, but replies to the email come straight to me.
Want to read before you subscribe? Browse past issues.
If this way of thinking resonates, you’re welcome to follow along—at your own pace.
