PERSONAL SIGNAL
The Necklace Breaking
During my last visit in Roanoke, I came home from an evening I loved. Jennifer and Susie, best friend and new one, around a table at Bobbi's Hot and Cheesy in Roanoke, which is a restaurant name that earns its own smile before you even look at the menu. We had pizza, prosecco on tap (yes, on tap), and the kind of conversation that makes the whole week feel worth it. I took Mr. Douglas out for his last walk before bed. It was dark. I still had my peach pit necklace on, the way I always do, because it has become part of what I wear when I walk out the door and apparently also what I wear when I walk back in.
I bent down to take care of Mr. Douglas's business and the necklace caught on the leash. I felt it before it broke, as if I knew it was coming, already in motion, unable to stop it. There was no sound. There was no phone in my hand to use as a light. There was only feel, touch, presence: the old fashioned way of seeing in the dark. I got calm, got down low, and picked up the pieces by touch. The whole thing took maybe two minutes. The necklace sits on my kitchen island now, waiting for me to find someone who can put it back together. I will find that person.
Here is what I keep returning to. The necklace broke because I wore it. Not because I dropped it or kept it somewhere safe or saved it for special occasions. It broke because it went everywhere I went: to the oyster bar, to the art show, to the mastermind, to late dinners and early mornings and every ordinary errand in between. A necklace you never take off will eventually break. That is not a sign of fragility. That is a sign of a life being fully worn.
When I wrote about the peach pit necklace last month, I gave a name to the grief I have been carrying since Fernando passed. I said grief travels through rooms. I still believe that. What I understand now, standing in the dark picking up small pieces of gold, is that grief also catches on things when you are not watching for it. It breaks open sometimes without warning. You get calm. You gather what you can. You find someone who knows how to repair the thing you are not willing to replace. The necklace will come back, and it will not come back the same. It will come back worn, repaired, and more itself than it was before.
THE NEXT LAYER
Sound as a belonging technology
There is a reason people have gathered around sound for thousands of years. Drums at a fire. Hymns in a sanctuary. A crowd singing words they all know back to a stage. Sound does something to the nervous system that belonging does too, it synchronizes. Your body is not a passive listener. It is participating.
I have attended two sound healing baths in Ojai, both at the top of a mountain, both at sunset. One session was outside, lying on the grass, the sky opening above us as the bowls began. The other was inside a circular room walled in windows, the light changing the whole time we were in it. Both were sixty minutes. Both were arranged by Elizabeth, who has a gift for imagining experiences that her people would never have thought to find on their own. I was with my mastermind cohorts each time, women I trust, women who show up. That combination, the sound, the setting, the people, did something I did not expect. I did not just feel relaxed. I felt held.
That is the belonging technology at work. Sound synchronizes nervous systems in a room. The research on communal music and social bonding is substantial. Shared auditory experience releases oxytocin, reduces cortisol, and creates a felt sense of connection that outlasts the session. You do not need to understand the mechanism to experience it.
What Elizabeth created on that mountain is available to all of us, with or without a mountain. YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon Music all carry full length sound healing sessions, crystal bowls, gong baths, binaural beats, theta wave playlists, most of them free. We can lie on the floor of our living rooms, close our eyes, and let sixty minutes do its work. We can do it alone or we can text three people we trust and make it a thing. The experience scales down beautifully. The belonging effect scales with it.
FOUNDER FIELD NOTES Katya Jackson — Engineer, Artist, Nihonga
At the Other Art Show, I stopped in front of a peach triptych. That is where Katya Jackson and I found each other. We stayed in touch, the way two women do when something in the other one answers something they did not know they were asking. She invited me to her studio. I went.
Katya Jackson spent years as an engineer. She understood systems, materials, how things hold together under pressure. Then in her 30s she made the pivot that most people think about and very few actually do. She walked toward the thing that had always been waiting and became a fine artist working across several mediums. Among them is Nihonga, an ancient Japanese painting tradition that uses Iwa Enogu: mineral pigments ground from stone, mixed with natural binders, applied to canvas or board. When light hits the surface, it glimmers. That is the mica in the stone catching it. The material holds light and gives it back slowly.
I was a physical science major in 1994. I spent time in a lab analyzing rocks, and mica was my favorite, those thin translucent sheets that caught everything. I had forgotten that until I walked into Katya's studio and found it again, this time as pigment, this time as art. Iwa Enogu: rock paint. I was already creating back then for my now. I just did not know what I was creating toward.
Her studio has vignettes everywhere. Gathered objects, compositions that feel considered and alive at the same time. She keeps an image journal the way I keep a word journal, two women doing the same thing in different languages. Then I noticed something taped to the wall. A picture of a painting unlike anything else in the room. I asked about it. She said it was from her teens. Gustav Klimt was her inspiration.
I told her something then. Years ago, early in my career at Estee Lauder, I had the rare privilege of a private dinner and museum viewing of Klimts with Mr. Leonard Lauder and Mr. Ronald Lauder. I received a book on The Kiss that evening. I have carried that image ever since, two figures so completely inside a moment that the world dissolves around them. Belonging as the entire subject of a painting.
Katya's teen painting, the one Klimt inspired, is in an attic in Boston. She is going to ask her mom to find it. I told her I am interested. There is creation all around that painting, all around that story, and it is nowhere near finished.
She showed me two monumental commissioned pieces she is working on. I asked about the pressure, the outcome is not guaranteed, the trust has to be total. She said: what if? I said: you are connected. Just allow. The trust is formed in the mystery. She already knew. She just needed to hear it out loud.
Katya is expecting twins this summer. She is building her art, her family, and two large paintings simultaneously, each one an act of faith. That is the Signal Edge definition of a woman who built something. Not the absence of fear. The presence of trust anyway.
We are beginning a commission project together. She will build something for my wall, built with me in mind. I do not know yet what it will look like. Neither does she. That is the whole point.
HEALTH SIGNAL
What the World Happiness Report actually says about your screen time.
Source: World Happiness Report 2026, Gallup / University of Oxford
Something in the World Happiness Report stopped me. They studied 136 countries and 270,000 people trying to understand what actually makes life feel good. I expected the usual conclusions. What I found was this: cutting social media helps a little. Belonging to something real helps six times more.
Six times. I kept returning to that number. When belonging goes from low to high, life satisfaction gains are four to six times greater than the gains from reducing screen time. The platform matters less than whether you feel genuinely seen within it.
There was a second thing worth sitting with. The researchers found that internet activities split into two groups. Communications, learning, creating, and reading news are associated with higher life satisfaction. Passive scrolling and browsing for entertainment pull in the opposite direction. You are reading a newsletter right now. You chose email over a feed. According to the largest happiness study in the world, that small choice is exactly the kind of intentionality that compounds.
The happiest countries share stable trust, real community, and moderate intentional digital use. I find that genuinely comforting. You can build your version of that anywhere. Signal Edge is one small piece of mine.
THE SIGNAL STACK
Nuropod — Week Two Report
I promised you data. What I have instead is a lesson, and I think it might be the more useful thing.
I had been wearing the neuropod each morning for thirty-plus minutes, feeling good about my streak. What I did not do first was read the best practices carefully. When I finally slowed down and looked, the protocol was clear: start with fifteen minutes in the evening and build from there. I had skipped the ramp entirely. My nervous system had been receiving the signal before it learned the language.
I have done a version of this before. When I lived in Salt Lake City, I decided my cats needed an outdoor enclosure. I bought the whole system, opened the box, and started putting it together before I had read through the instructions. My then-husband came out to help and found that the metal had already clicked into a configuration that could not be undone. We both just stood there looking at it. I know from my human design that I am a Manifesting Generator, someone who is genuinely built for action and momentum. Slowing down does not come as the first instinct. It is something I practice.
Here is the funny thing. Even on the mornings when I was doing it wrong, the process of putting the device on slowed me down whether I was ready or not. The tragus clip has a specific fit. You feel for it, adjust, feel again. The pulse intensity has a range and you find yours by listening to what your body tells you it wants. None of that can be rushed. My teacup poodle Mr. Douglas has also made sure of this. He is deeply interested in the wires and the earpiece, and redirecting him has become its own small ritual at the start of every session. By the time the neuropod is actually on and calibrated, something in me has already started to arrive. The device teaches you to slow down just by requiring your full attention to use it.
I have reset and am following the protocol properly now. The data will come. For now, the signal from week two is quiet: take a breath before you begin, and if you forget, Mr. Douglas will remind you.
PASSIVE INCOME PULSE
The belonging economy
I moved into my new neighborhood on Thanksgiving 2025. The walk I live on is shared by ten houses, and somewhere along the way the people here made an unspoken agreement. They planted things and then gave them away. My neighbor has what I can only describe as a cucumber avocado tree. It produces avocados without the pit, shaped like cucumbers, and I did not know such a thing existed until I lived next door to one. Another neighbor grows grapefruit. Another figs. Another lemons. I have a tangerine tree, and this morning I walked a bag full of them to the house next door. Fresh, abundant, no transaction required.
This is the oldest passive income model there is. You tend something, it produces, and you release it into the community around you. What comes back is not always what you sent out, and it is not always financial. It is referrals, it is relationships, it is the kind of trust that makes someone think of you first when something matters. The return on belonging does not show up on a balance sheet. It shows up in the rooms you get invited into, the opportunities that arrive without a pitch, the partnerships that form because someone who knows you told someone who needed you.
You are already doing this. The masterminds you invest in, the newsletters you read, the communities you have chosen to belong to, these are your trees. The passive income case for belonging is proven and personal. It is the tangerine on your neighbor's counter with your name on it, and the fig that arrives at your door three weeks later, and the avocado introduction that changes the way you think about what is possible.
The invitation this week: look at the communities you already belong to and ask what you have been giving into them. The return is already growing. Most of us just forget to look.
A SIGNAL FOR THE WOMEN WHO BUILT
The cohort with the most agency.
Something in the World Happiness Report made me feel genuinely good about who reads Signal Edge. The study looked at how internet use affects wellbeing across generations. For Gen Z the relationship is strongly negative. For Millennials, moderately negative. For Gen X, nearly flat. For Baby Boomers, slightly positive. The women in this community sit right at that inflection point where the same choices that erode wellbeing for younger generations begin to compound forward instead.
What do older cohorts have that younger generations are losing? The report names three things: stable trust, growing attachment to place and community, and moderate intentional digital use. Not passive outcomes. Decisions made over decades about what to invest in and what to let go. You already know how to make those decisions. You have been making them your whole life.
Signal Edge fits neatly into this. You chose to receive signal directly, from a source you trust, at a pace you control. That is the moderate intentional digital use the research identifies as a wellbeing asset. You already knew how to do this. The data just caught up.
ONE MORE THING
We hit the founding member goal. I am keeping the doors open through April because I am not ready to close the room yet, and the right number matters less to me right now than the right people finding their way in. If you have been sitting with it, April is your month.
Something else is coming and I want to name it here first. I am working on building a delight element into Signal Edge. The idea is simple: things that have edged their way into my life, found their place, and earned a permanent spot. The ones that create that small quiet sound of something landing exactly right. I want to be able to put one of those things in your hands. I am working out the details this April, the funding, the right pricing, the right introduction. When it is ready it will feel the way a good gift always feels: like someone was actually paying attention.
More soon. Stay curious. Stay in charge.
Holly
Everything in Signal Edge reflects my own research, curiosity, and lived experience. I am not a licensed financial planner, certified tax advisor, registered investment advisor, or medical professional. Nothing here constitutes financial, investment, tax, legal, or medical advice. It is personal opinion, shared openly and honestly from one thinking person to another. Please consult qualified professionals before making decisions about your money, health, or property.
© Holly Culbreth / Signal Edge. All rights reserved.