A prophet once wrote that a person has found his or her true vocation when they stop thinking about how to live and begin to live.

People who have run from the idea of loving what they do will worry so much when they are alone, writes Thomas Merton, they will forget to live.

When we are not being fulfilled, not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of conscience and meaning. We live in a restless kind of anxiety.

When we find out what it is we are meant to do, thought and life becomes one thing, not two different things.

I am beginning to live. I have found my vocation, a place to call home, a community around me. My words are my vocation, my blog is my vocation, my photography is my vocation, my farm is my vocation,  my love is my vocation. I have found these things one after the other, not because I am lucky or brilliant, but because they are the right things for me to be doing and feeling.

I am determined to live.

I no longer need deep and structured contemplation to be a special state apart from life.

I am free at last, tethered only by the material and physical strings of life, as we all are.

I do not have to think about giving an account of myself, or arguing about myself, or explaining myself to anyone but me and the angels that swirling around me, stinging my face and skin with the bites of cherubs when I fall into fear and lament and think too much about what others think.