Distance becomes harmful only when fueled by bitterness. But when chosen with clarity, space becomes medicine. A reset. A pause. A boundary that protects both hearts.
Choosing space doesn’t mean you’re done loving. It means you’re done bleeding. It means you are choosing to evolve without forcing someone else to evolve beside you.
Space isn’t an ending, it’s soil. What grows from it is entirely new.
Gentle Practice: Take one minute and imagine space around your heart, light, breathable, warm. Let yourself expand into it.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow, we complete Week Two by exploring how to enter gatherings (or solitude) from a place of strength rather than reaction.
“Sadness can mingle within, when you least expect it, give it room to move out.”
Sadness comes quietly, often in the quieter or darker winter months. Not always how or when you may expect it. A gentle reminder to return to the parts of you you’ve been resting within. Instead of resisting it, allow it to show you where softness is needed.
Sadness doesn’t shrink you when you breathe into it, it deepens you, it builds new roots, it clears space for joy that’s more honest than before.
Hold the ache lightly. Let it speak in whispers. Every tear waters the next becoming.
Gentle practice: Sit still for one minute and say: “This feeling is not forever. But it belongs for now.”
-Kerri-Elizabeth Tomorrow, we’ll make room for joy to return, gently, not forcefully.
“Growth doesn’t erase the ache, it gives it a softer place to land.”
This week has revealed what many endure quietly: fractured families, mismatched energies, financial strain, the weight of expectation, the longing for peace. And yet through every truth runs a single thread, your right to honor yourself while still holding compassion for others. No one gets through life untouched by heartache. But you can choose to grow through it instead of shrinking beneath it.
Growth doesn’t mean you don’t cry. It doesn’t mean you don’t wish things were different. It simply means you refuse to define yourself by what fractured. You’ve learned to breathe where others collapse, to step back without shame, to love without needing a seat at every table. You’re not avoiding life, you’re choosing the version of life that keeps you whole.
Lay down what drains, carry what lifts. Let truth be your lantern in all of winter’s shifts.
Gentle practice: Tonight, write down one thing you’re releasing and one thing you’re carrying forward. Both are part of your becoming.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow begins Week Two, a deeper walk into holiday grace, emotional safety, connection on your terms, and redefining what “family” can mean.
“Not all distance is punishment; sometimes it’s the safest place to breathe.”
There are seasons when families fracture into separate rooms, separate holidays, separate traditions. It hurts. It confuses. It questions your worth. You wonder if you did something unforgivable or if love simply misplaced itself along the years. But sometimes distance isn’t rejection, it’s growth unfolding unevenly. Some people aren’t ready to sit together yet, and that truth doesn’t have to harden your heart.
Healing rarely begins in the middle of chaos. Sometimes it happens in quiet kitchens, long walks, RVs parked outside the noise, or in the hands of those who learned to love from afar. You can grieve the closeness you imagined while honoring the peace you’ve found. Both truths can live in the same breath.
Distance can soften edges where closeness once cut deep. Let the space become a kindness, a place for hearts to sleep.
Gentle practice: Take a few minutes today to bless the space, not the separation. Say: “May every heart grow at its own pace.”
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow we’ll explore the rooms we cannot share, and why that is sometimes holy. (This piece begins a two-week series on navigating holidays with truth, energy, boundaries, finances, and heart.)
Some stand on the shore, torn between the pull of two tides, afraid to lose sight of either horizon.
There are places where the heart feels pulled in opposite directions , a delicate thread stretched between two shores, never sure which way the wind will blow.
Sometimes it is not the storm itself that wears you down, but the weight of holding both the anchor and the sail. One hand clings to the dock, the other reaches for open water, and you are left wondering which will give first.
To love people who stand on different sides is to live in a constant negotiation with yourself ,how to hold loyalty without losing truth, how to be faithful to more than one compass at a time. Those who live there often believe they are keeping the peace, yet they walk on a bridge that sways over a chasm neither side wishes to see.
But bridges creak under the strain. And when the wind shifts, the boards remind you that you cannot belong to both shores without feeling the splinters.
There are moments when you hope for a stand, not a battle, but a quiet, unwavering refusal to join what is wrong, even if it comes dressed in silk and lace. It is the unseen courage you long for, the voice that says, I see the harm in this, and I will not step into it.
When that voice is silent, you feel it in your bones. You watch the gatherings where absence has been engineered, the empty chairs where history once sat. You stand at the edge of the celebration and feel the chill of being placed in the shadows, while strangers are handed the front row.
It is a strange ache, to grieve what is still alive. To watch laughter carry a song that once belonged to your deepest mourning, and realize it is being danced upon without you.
And yet, even in that ache, you may still plant flowers along the invisible fence , sun-warm petals and soft-leafed roses , as both gift and boundary. A way of saying, I see you, I love you, and here is where the water meets the land. Even if the gesture is misunderstood, even if it is whispered against, you know the truth of your own hands and the soil they tended.
Somewhere inside, you know that the journey back to one another is not entirely yours to navigate. Sometimes you cannot swim against both tides. Sometimes you have to anchor to your own truth, and let the currents choose what washes back to shore.
~Kerri-Elizabeth~
But tides never rest for long. Tomorrow, we enter “After the Eye” , where the stillness is a trick of light, and the storm, patient as a predator, waits just beyond the horizon.
“When you stop resisting what you feel, the storm becomes part of the sky.”
This day carries two worlds.
One is quiet, a field wrapped in ferns and trees, where the grass breathes beneath my feet and small wildflowers bow in the breeze. The air holds no hurry, only the slow turning of the sun across the sky. It is a place away from the hum of preparation, away from voices, away from the invisible weight that gathers in the presence of too many expectations.
The other world waits at the lake. There, the water glistens like it is holding its breath, catching light in sharp silver fragments. The sound of laughter drifts across the surface, tangled with movement and unspoken tension. It is close enough to touch, yet far enough that I can step away, returning to the stillness where silence settles like a friend beside me.
Between these two worlds, something significant unfolds. A gathering large enough to stir deep currents, filled with people whose histories are intertwined with mine, some bound by love, others by fracture. There are unspoken allegiances here, silent decisions to stand beside one person by turning away from another. There are those whose eyes meet mine with warmth, and others who cannot look at me at all. Words are not always spoken, yet judgments travel in the tilt of a chin, the pause in a greeting, the space someone leaves between us as they pass.
It is a peculiar vantage point — to be so close I could reach out and touch the edges of it, yet far enough to choose not to step inside. From here I can see the weaving of loyalties and the severing of ties. I can watch the way people navigate the discomfort of proximity, the way some drift toward neutrality while others seem easily pulled by the tide of someone else’s version of the truth.
What might have once been painful has become, in its own way, a blessing. Distance has given me a clearer view of human nature — of how quickly stories can take root, how easily one can become a stranger in a place they once belonged. It has shown me the cost of bending to keep the peace, and the rare beauty of standing still while the world decides where it wishes to place you.
Last night, as we sat talking, we saw what we thought was a distant light. But it was the moon, full and magnificent, pouring its glow through the trees. Its brilliance turned the night into a silver dream, so bright it felt as though it was speaking directly to us.
And what I love most is that my husband is walking his own path through this day, just as I am. We give each other the freedom to feel without asking for explanations. No one tells the other how to stand, how to think, how to carry the weight of this moment. We trust that however the other needs to be is enough. No conditions. No corrections. Just the grace of allowing.
Allowing has become my quiet revolution. If I want cookies for breakfast, I will. If I want to plant flowers with dirt under my nails, I will. If I want to wander in circles or sit perfectly still, I will. If I want to cry until my chest aches, I will. I am learning that feelings are not fires to be put out. They are rivers to be followed, their currents sometimes wild, sometimes slow, but always moving me toward a wider sea.
When I allow myself to feel, the anxiety loosens sooner. The urge to resist fades. Even the ache softens because it is no longer trapped. And sometimes, in the middle of it all, I find beauty I would have missed if I had tried to control the moment. The way the moon’s light slips between branches, the way a fish breaks the surface of the lake, the way the air feels before rain.
So today, I am here. In both worlds. In all my colors. Moving as I need to move. Breathing as I need to breathe. And in the allowing, I find a freedom I have waited my whole life to meet.
We all have stories— some passed down, some passed around, some born from glances never explained.
I’ve learned that the same story can be told a hundred different ways depending on who holds the pen. One person remembers the way the light hit the kitchen table. Another remembers the silence after a slammed door. Some recall laughter. Some can’t forget the ache. And none of it makes any of it less real.
What’s hardest is when the stories begin to live lives of their own—shaped by whispers, fueled by wounds, rewritten by those who need a version that comforts their pain.
Sometimes love is rewritten into betrayal, connection into threat, guidance into control. And suddenly, you find yourself a villain in a story you never wrote.
There is a kind of grief—no, not grief, but a reckoning— when a child is no longer allowed to speak to you. Not because of something you did, but because someone else needed them to stop listening.
Needed them to carry their pain, to make sense of their own wounds by silencing yours. And so, a legacy is broken, not by truth, but by the stories others told loud enough, long enough, that it began to sound like history.
And yet…
There are other children, other souls who are spared the chaos, who find family in love, who are given the gift of choosing their path—not out of fear or pressure, but through the soft unfolding of experience. They come to know love not as a tool or a transaction, but as a presence.
That is the hope. That is the beauty in this brokenness.
Because we cannot fix the feelings others are determined to carry. We cannot rewrite their chapters. But we can stop reading the story aloud to ourselves.
We can sit with it—not to suffer it, but to let it soften. To breathe it in only long enough to find the lesson, and then breathe it out as something lighter.
This is how we stop the inheritance of pain. This is how we leave space for joy, even if some never return.
We do not need to resent them. We do not need to chase them. We simply need to be here—fully here— with all the love that remains.
The past is not ours to fix. But the present… the present is ours to live.
Let the story pass. Let the breath deepen. Let the legacy of love be louder than the lie.
Some things don’t arrive when we call for them. Answers. Apologies. Understanding. Sometimes, even love itself can feel like it’s running on a different clock.
And when you’re the one waiting, it can ache. When you’re the one needing, it can stir a deeper awareness— a noticing of how timing shapes everything. And when you’re the one who can’t respond yet, it can bring a quiet tension you don’t yet know how to name.
We don’t all meet life at the same tempo. Some of us move fast—urgent to solve, to connect, to resolve. Others need time, silence, space to feel their way forward.
But what happens in the pause between one person’s need and the other’s delay?
A whisper sneaks in: “They don’t care.” “They’re avoiding me.” “This always happens.” Something quiet begins to sharpen beneath the surface— not rage, not cruelty—just the subtle weight of unmet timing. An edge forms. And it cuts without anyone meaning to.
This obstacle can teach. And it can take away. It can open us to compassion or close us in resentment.
The question becomes: How do we meet each other with honor when we’re out of rhythm? How do we stay kind when we’re tired of holding the silence? How do we not make their timing mean something about our worth?
Not every pause is punishment. Not every delay is disregard. But the stories we’ve lived may whisper otherwise.
It’s not just a language barrier—it’s a life barrier. Different nervous systems. Different stories. Different shapes of presence and processing.
But if we can pause—not to press, not to fix, but to see the other in their timing— maybe we create a space where no one is wrong.
Maybe we say: “I’m feeling the weight of waiting. I just need you to know.” Or: “I don’t have the words yet, but your heart matters to me.”
And just like that, we step out of the battle, and into the bridge.
A Rhythm We Haven’t Learned Yet
Sometimes, I wait for you like the moon waits for the tide— knowing it will come, but not knowing when.
Sometimes, you need space like a mountain needs mist— not to disappear, but to breathe.
We move like dancers to different songs, feet aching when we try to lead each other through rhythms we haven’t learned yet.
But what if this is the music?
What if the space between us isn’t a problem to solve, but a sacred silence where trust and truth begin to rise?
So I’ll stay present— not in pause, but in practice. Not waiting to live, but living in love while the dance finds its shape.
Whether we meet in step or drift apart like waves— I am still whole and still here. Breathing. Becoming. With or without the answer.
-Kerri-Elizabeth-
What have you learned about your own rhythm—and how do you honor it while loving someone whose pace is different from yours?
SONSHINE FOR YOU 