What breaks does not stay broken.
Brightness survives shattered stars.
God shut his eyes for a moment,
but that distance is just
the long way back to being held.
Don’t stop believing in all that matters.
My name is Kristen Holmes. 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 of us: 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. What I’ve come to realize is that this practice is not a project for me. It is the ongoing work of a lifetime.
New field notes arrive roughly weekly- get them by email. I hope you’ll wander in.
- 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.