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.
Keep faith with 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 three 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 and writings arrive roughly weekly. Get them by email. I hope you’ll wander in.
- The Whole Instruction
This poem names two nervous systems. One carries pain like a stone, the braced body under chronic load, still holding a threat it never healed. The other sets it down in the open light and observes and learns without the constant brace. The difference isn’t how much pain arrives. It’s whether the system can let it move fluidly from a place of fear to a place of trust. Trusting that you can hold and manage whatever flows through you. - The Night Come
Desire is the nervous system’s movement toward what it cares about, the impulse to reach before the mind has found its reasons. What’s notable here isn’t the absence of struggle. It’s that the body reaches anyway, leaning into the weather rather than letting it decide, and that leaning is its own kind of aliveness. - Raw Materials
The real subject of this poem is less about romance and more about the trade every act of preservation makes. An album, a pressed petal, a poem, even a field note like this one…none of it is the living thing. It’s what’s left after you decide the living thing was worth keeping, in whatever form keeping is possible.