I study the interrelationships between body and mind for a living. One thing I’ve learned: long before physiology becomes data, it is experience.
This is a notebook of those experiences — the ones common to all humans: grief, love, heartache, hope. Small moments gathered from daily life, sketches made in passing, paintings I’ve wrestled with for days or weeks, and passages from others that send me down a rabbit hole of contemplation.
I’ve spent over two decades inside high-stakes performance environments — as an athlete, a coach, and now a scientist — testing what the body’s signals mean and whether they can be trusted. They can. The same physiological grammar that shapes an Olympian’s readiness shapes a parent of three’s. This notebook is where that conviction meets the smaller, stranger evidence: a deer, a poem, a line that stops me in my tracks.
Each note begins with attention. Then comes reflection through the lens of psychophysiology — the rhythms of the nervous system, the biology of emotion, the patterns that shape how we inhabit the world. Finally, the observation becomes something else: a poem, an essay, a drawing, a fragment of prose.
When I engage creatively, I build the capacity to be truly present: not just with a canvas or a page, but with the people in front of me. When I write, read poetry, or paint, I create space to reflect and grow. That deliberate slowing down doesn’t pull me away from performance or the hard tasks required of me. It returns me to it: clearer, more present, more capable. This is not a weekend insight for me. It is the ongoing work of a lifetime.
New field notes arrive roughly weekly- get them by email. I hope they’re helpful.
This is where science meets wonder.
- Joy
What a deer can teach us about the difference between fear and suffering. - Gladness
A poem for my children, and the Rockwell Kent painting that inspired it. - In the Woods
I would go into the woods behind my house. I’m not sure if I was escaping, exactly — I think what I craved was predictability, and the woods had it.