Paula — Holy Nature
She is often painted in Byzantine-tinged frescoes wearing a tunic of undyed burlap, woven with living moss. Her halo is not gold, but a translucent ring of captured sunlight (a “solar aureole”). In her left hand, she holds a broken rosary whose beads have sprouted into wild berries; in her right, a single, unlit dandelion clock. At her feet, a hare sleeps beside a fox—not miraculously pacified, but because both recognize her as part of the terrain. II. The Legend (Hagiography) Paula was not born, but noticed —first seen kneeling in a hollow cedar at the edge of a boreal bog, already an adult, already holy. Oral tradition says she was a 4th-century hermit who walked into the Black Forest and refused to leave. When a bishop’s envoy came to retrieve her for formal canonization, they found her speaking in slow, root-like sentences. “I have been canonized by frost,” she told them. “My relics are the mycelium.”
Ecologists, rewilding projects, cemeteries, abandoned lots, the terminally ill (who, like autumn leaves, are learning to let go), and anyone who has ever felt guilty for loving a spider. VI. The Controversy Some orthodox theologians argue Paula is not a saint but a pantheist. Her reply (recorded in the apocryphal Book of Thorns ): “Pantheism says ‘All is God.’ I say ‘God is the all-ness, but also the nothing between the leaves.’ Call me a panentheist if it helps you sleep. The woodlouse does not care.” holy nature paula
She was never officially canonized by Rome. Instead, she was canonized by the mycelial network—which, as her devotees note, is the oldest and most patient church on earth. Let Holy Nature Paula watch over your compost, your overgrown fence line, and the corner of the yard you secretly hope no one mows. She is often painted in Byzantine-tinged frescoes wearing
She lived without fire or bread. In winter, she slept in the belly of a fallen oak. In spring, her tears, shed for dying saplings, were collected by finches as medicine for blighted crops. When a drought struck seven villages, the people came to cut her sacred grove for firewood. She did not argue. Instead, she lay down at the tree line and let morning glory vines grow over her mouth. The villagers, ashamed by her utter non-resistance, left their axes in the dirt. That night, it rained for the first time in nine months. At her feet, a hare sleeps beside a
