I woke this morning before dawn, and as the first light broke, there was beautiful birdsong coming from the graveyard, even though it's late autumn, and it felt like that dawn in the garden on the morning of the resurrection of our Lord, and I felt Jesus with me.

I have applied for two hospital jobs - I don't know if I'll get them. I might. I don't think I should explore vocation in a vacuum, and although I wonder if I might become a nun, ultimately that is not for me to say... so I'm channelling the same impulse into the possibility of nursing - as a nursing assistant in the coming months, and then maybe applying for full nurse training when I have more experience. The chances of being accepted at my age and with my gender-variance may be a little bit slim, but not impossible. At least I may just get on and live the way I ought to live - caring for others and serving them - and if a convent community invites me to explore vocation and living with them, then I will explore that in prayer.

As I wrote to Michael yesterday, about St. Thérèse and her 'little way', I am so often a shambles but I'd love to live her way - I think that's why I want to be a nurse or a nun if God chooses to let it be so. And just care for people privately, and be the smallest of the sisters. Really, my life is in God's hands eternally. What we have to do, basically and practically, is to be open-hearted to love, don't you think? I'm sure I have NO idea just what those words will cost and where they'll take me, but I have a very good idea of what I've been and where I've come from, and that is both instructive and shameful, but pray that I may find grace to just get on and follow Jesus Christ because really there is no other way. For me, that is. I couldn't bear to turn back to where I've been, and the path in his company may seem hard to follow sometimes but it is a path with him. It's a doing path, way past all these words. These words are just me explaining where I may be going.

(Footnote 6 years later: I worked for 18 months as a nursing assistant on a critical care unit, then trained for three years as a nurse, and qualified in summer 2014. I also explored vocation as a nun. This involved staying for a total of 16 weeks in three convents, over a five year period. The love and guidance I received - and lessons about community, contemplation, vocation, and religious life - were profoundly helpful. I was invited to come and live with a community in February 2015, but in the same way that I felt God telling me 'not' to proceed to ordination back in 1985, but to 'grow in love', I actually felt that I should 'not' enter convent full-time when the invitation came. Yet I recognise myself and identify as a religious sister, and in doing so I feel I understand myself and who I can be - so the decision to live 'in the world', and loving relationship with someone who became precious in my life, opens other possible doors, other paths, other futures. So I continue to try to explore and live out vocation, not only about the future, but who I am today, and the people I meet today. In some ways this is exciting. In some ways I am still working it out. But all the way along the path, we can journey with God, we can respond to God's grace. And there is so much beauty, so much love, in God, in other people, even in ourselves if we accept how God feels about us. The 'Road to Nowhere' is also the 'Road to Now here', and God can be right here, right now, and says 'Follow Me' and we follow... and God journeys with us... and that makes all the difference.)

Crossing Rannoch Moor, my son leading the way, 2007