On Her YouTube Channel, The Cottage Fairy Encourages Simple Living

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.

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 on her iPhone and later, a professional camera, courtesy of her brother who works in film tech. Her first video is completely devoid speech — a format she learned from certain East Asian video creators, who produce “silent vlogs,” or vlogs without talking.

Eventually she realized she could share her writing via carefully crafted voiceovers in her natural speaking voice — the same she used to get in trouble for at customer service jobs. “I was brought into my boss’s office every few months and told to speak louder, to have a more assertive voice,” she says. On YouTube, “it was funny to get this response of, ‘Oh, it’s very calming to listen to you.’”

Merrill’s distinct style is often described as cottagecore, but perhaps with a distinctly Latine approach to the trend beyond the folklore. Her debut book, The Cottage Fairy Companion: A Cottagecore Guide to Slow Living, Connecting to Nature, and Becoming Enchanted Again, which was released November 2022, is equal parts foraging and season appreciation as it is a familial memoir full of updated Puerto Rican recipe classics, like a lavender arroz con dulce and coquito. (Admittedly, she didn’t even know what “cottagecore” was until a fan commented on her Instagram about it.) She’s always loved prairie dresses and vintage clothing, a lot inspired by her abuela — her maternal, Boricua family are frequently featured on her channel.

But the lifestyle change — moving from a university city to the wilderness — came about because of a few factors beyond her aesthetic pursuits. Her family lives close by, so she wanted to be near them. She’d always had an interest in nature and living her own kind of fairy tale, and the move allowed her to “embrace that part of me," she explains. “I spent several years recovering from an eating disorder, so it was a phase in life where I was learning how to find balance and a healthy lifestyle for me, whatever that meant…. It was just kind of fortuitous that my own interests aligned with what people happen to be interested in. Especially during that time.”

She’s referring, of course, to the pandemic. When I first discovered Merrill’s videos, I, like many of her 1.36 million subscribers, was searching for some kind of balm. It was only in continuing to dive into her meditative videos that I realized we came from very similar backgrounds: Both of our moms are Puerto Rican and our dads white; we grew up in military environments, which meant moving around every couple of years, worrying about war and family and safety, and learning how to be adaptable in new situations.

For her, the latter meant the solitude of very remote Washington but also ideologically — she learned to adapt to a different mode of thinking, “elevating the ordinary,” as she describes it. “Focusing on the things around you, dandelions on your lawn, childlike things…grounding a little more in daily life and seeing the mundane as something to be celebrated.”

For those who love her videos, the benefit of that kind of thinking is easy to see: It’s all stress release and sunshine and linens and cruel winters and reborn springs. But not everyone gets it. “Early on, common comments were like, ‘This is so boring. How can you do this?’ I was like, ‘Fair enough,’” she laughs.

But for her, it’s anything but. “Being around the military, there’s this element growing up of hearing about friends whose parents were killed. I think I had a sense of, ‘You could lose so much; life is so unpredictable and impermanent. There had to be something deeper to ground myself in.’” That meant recognizing that she could find peace in the small, boring stuff — while also recognizing and proselytizing to her audience that “happiness is not a place… and there isn’t a perfect place.”

And yet, she’s found hers: on the kind of land her Puerto Rican family has longed to live on, a literal fulfillment of an innate, ancestral connection to the natural world.

When I first started watching her videos, I thought I was drawn to Merrill’s disconnected life — she didn’t have wifi for a period and would travel into town to upload her videos — but her utilization of online mediums proves that she isn’t about eliminating modern convenience. Instead, she aims to transform the everyday, to “go outside and appreciate the sky, take a moment for mindful breathing,” as she describes it. Her perspective shift can serve anyone — in the wilderness, in a major city, or seated on a couch, waiting for vlogs from a stranger on YouTube.