Particle physics is just crazy land to me. I understand Newton's equations. I understand Maxwell's equations. Hey, I even understand Schroedinger's equation. But all these particles!?
No, particles are particles [1], those fields in quantum field theory are just mathematical tools to deal with many particle systems in a manifest local and unitary way. There might of course actually be fields in the real world, but we have no evidence for that and those fields would not be the fields that appear in quantum field theory.
[1] Obviously not classical particles like tiny billiard balls.
Here is Nima Arkani-Hamed giving the Salam lectures 2012, a five day series on the state of fundamental physics. I marked [1] about 30 seconds where he is very clear about this. You can also start here [2] and watch about 10 minutes of this lecture where he quickly redevelops the ideas of quantum field theory.
The air temperature on earth is a field, a function that takes a position on the ground, a height above ground, and a time and returns the temperature at that point and time. And so is the wind velocity, just that the value of the function is not the temperature, a single number also called a scalar, but a vector pointing in the direction of the wind and with a length proportional to the wind speed. Temperature is therefore called a scalar field, wind velocity a vector field, and there or other kinds of fields like tensor fields, for example, which are a generalization of scalar and vector fields.
It seems to usually be visualized as 2d plane-like sheet that can oscillate, and those oscillations represent particles. In reality it should be 3d, but that is much harder to draw.
[1]Unless it's a constant field, in which case you'll feel the same pull no matter where you go.