Last February, YouTuber/writer/artist Paola Merrill, aka the Cottage Fairy, uploaded a video titled “How I Keep Daily Life Interesting and Magical.” About 11 minutes in, she breaks her usual form — mostly pastoral scenes and bucolic filmic montages of her day-to-day activities of crafting, writing, painting, cooking, foraging, and exploring, all with a poetic voiceover and piano instrumentals — to speak directly to camera.
She starts to tell a legend tied to her maternal ancestry, Taíno folklore passed on from her Puerto Rican family; it’s rarer, she reveals, to find these kinds of stories compared to those from her Celtic paternal background. The narrative goes a little something like this: The nature-loving Taíno daughter of a powerful cacique, or chief, falls in love with a boy who is a Carib, “from a different group,” as Merrill explains.
Her father disapproves of the union and tells her she can only partner with someone from their village, so the girl asks the gods to help her find a way to be with the boy she loves. They do. They turn her into a flower and the boy into a hummingbird. “Whenever you see a hummingbird going from flower to flower to flower looking for nectar,” Merrill smiles, “the hummingbird is actually looking for their lost love.”
Her voice is soft, slow, sing-song-y and measured — not quite ASMR but the tone of a gentle adult, the kind children implicitly trust. And it’s no wonder: She was an alternative preschool teacher in her remote Washington Valley before getting laid off in the pandemic. In the years since, she’s focused her attention on YouTube, and her simple living videos have become a kind of balm for people interested in sustainability and healing through nature.
The appeal of her videos isn’t as easy as escapism, per se, but an exercise in gratitude and grounding yourself. And as a Latina, with ancestry taken, colored and oppressed by imperialism — Puerto Rico is the U.S.’s oldest colony — returning to the land, and practicing a deep appreciation for nature, feels nothing short of radical.
The appeal of her videos isn’t as easy as escapism, per se, but an exercise in gratitude and grounding yourself. And as a Latina, with ancestry taken, colored and oppressed by imperialism — Puerto Rico is the U.S.’s oldest colony — returning to the land, and practicing a deep appreciation for nature, feels nothing short of radical.
Merrill moved to her version of Walden from the coastal city of Bellingham, WA in June 2019 and uploaded her first video to YouTube a year later, a few months into COVID-19 lockdowns. “I saw my local conservancy doing a lot of work to bring awareness to the area to hopefully preserve it, and it motivated me to try and highlight the beauty of everything [through video],” she tells Refinery 29 Somos.
A lifelong writer and illustrator, Merrill started experimenting with filmmaking …read more
Source:: Refinery29
