The kiss upon our lips simple with love, gracious and profound

I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone
I recommend walking around naked in your living room
Swallow it down (what a jagged little pill)
It feels so good (swimming in your stomach)
Wait until the dust settles
You live you learn
You love you learn
You cry you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn

(From the album Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette)

Another attempt at a reboot of my life...

Sometimes life shifts beneath your feet. Hope dies and death seems like a viable choice. The effect is seismic, stability is lost and the tight swirls of colour that surround our lives giving vibrancy and joy tightens into a sucking black hole where we are blind and lost in a maze of our own making. Only the light can lead us out.
I remember a long run on the North Downs of Kent a few years ago, where the rain was biblical to the point where it was a dull roar and this combined with the howl of an unceasing wind was unnerving and disorientating. The base of the clouds descended to brush the fields and when I reached out to grasp them with pale and skeletal fingers they proved to be cold and void. Visibility was down to a few metres and the sunken trails were like streams. I was so devastated by the sheer and overwhelming sensory overload that I wanted to sit down in the mud and weep. I felt abandoned and alone.
It was a day where I had no clue where I was, where I was going or how I was going to get there.
That in a nutshell is how I feel about life now. I still don't have the answers, that blueprint seems to be lost to me.
A wise man once told me that all we need to lose each other is to diverge a single degree away from each other. After 10 metres we can still see each other, after 200 metres it gets harder and we have to shout. Soon we are lost to each other possibly forever.
Yet there is a glimmer for me, a subliminal flash of light that I need to interpret, the stub of a candle stood in a pool of its own hot wax and flickering a defiance into the dark. It is people who care.
I run, Sometimes to kill the snakes in my head, my skin sour with sweat and failure, my face itchy with a three day stubble and possessed with a dystopian soul. I run between the spaces of the passing hours, hollowed out, my life marked not by the clocks tick but by the sharp crack of the jagged little pills that I swallow daily, my chemical friends bouncing on the kitchen top and rolling beneath the microwave. I run over and over and over this ground, these trails and past the hollow tree because I believe this is all I have. It is the place that I come to play Jesus to the lepers in my head, the place I seek forgiveness and its gift of peace.   
Yesterday I ran with a group of my colleagues, Annie and Kate, Guy and Andy. We were joined by Dan Thompson, CEO of The Gold Challenge. Dan is aiming to run in every country of the world by the 2020 Olympics promoting the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and fund raising for cancer research. He was visiting our school and was up for a run in the woods. It reinforced for me the value of running and human connection which I am still learning the art of. I have never been good at it and don't understood relationships, the complexity required to grow and maintain them overwhelms me. I am useless at nuance and interpretation. 

I am making an effort now because time is short and I must act. Sometimes people come into your life with a brilliant light at an appropriate moment, becoming a radiant Gordian knot to be unraveled and discovered. They bring with them the sharp flare of hope and if they carry an unquenchable and consistent love the effect is mesmerising and powerful. These people are the well diggers, unblocking the wellsprings of your life, patiently wading through the muck with you and guiding you out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the fertile uplands. Often you discover that they also walk with a limp and the narcotic kiss of love becomes mutually beneficial.
These two things are my hope, to love and to run, through my archaic woods, mumbling nonsense to the cows, sheep and horses, being startled by squirrels and out staring the fox. I shall dangle my feet over the rivers swirl, meditate at the ponds edge and salute the dead tree hollowed by fire, the slow creep of moss and the soft feet of insects with sharp mandibles cracking against it. I shall pursue love and friendship in the hope that this is the path that will lead me to a place of healing.

I think you will find that I love you the most...

Take my hand and run with me, together we will limp content through the radiant fields, lost in a joyful maze of a thousand blooms whose coloured heads nod for infinity toward the sun

our together blood singing to a million whispering stars,

the kiss upon our lips simple with love, gracious and profound

lighting the spark divine and complete

given with no request or bind

but only a song
Give me hope. Give me friendship, give me love.
(duncan ditto)
💙

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head
(U2)