I'm Heather Donahue, previously known as The Girl from The Blair Witch Project. That was back when I was a city girl. Now I'm a country girl, living in a tiny Northern California town nestled in the Sierra foothills, and I'm mostly known as a friend, a neighbor and the lady who wrote that book about being a pot grower.
When I burnt up my LA life out in the desert, (headshots, resumes, lingerie, lint -- a flaming rainbow) and moved up here, friends and family were bewildered. Often they still are. Maybe you are too. Since I'm going to start regularly sharing some rural goodness on Yahoo! Shine (there's a small dating pool, but a big river to swim in) I thought maybe I should try to explain. Why do I think I live in some kind of magical land? How about just the top ten things?
10. There's always parking. Really, do you know how nice that is? Not something I ever have to think about.
9. It felt like home from the first minute. Once I trusted that I wanted to be here, even though it didn't look anything like the life I had before, that trickled down into all kinds of other gut-trusting.
8. I gained the solitude I needed to get to know myself better. I live in a little barn with an unreliable internet connection and two bars on a clear day. I am undistracted. This has helped me find the time to do the work I've dreamed of, and to clarify what I even mean by that.
7. I stopped resisting change. Not only by moving here and leaving my old life behind, but just by being here. There's this week in April where the new oak leaves are a translucent chartreuse that pretty much triggers an instant dopamine dump in the brain. The tree doesn't seem to mind that green gets deeper and duller by the next week, so I probably shouldn't either. It's just how things go. One week there are poppies in the meadow, a couple weeks later it's all gone gold. It makes me notice. I like to think that noticing makes me a better listener, a better friend to all the people and things.
6. Because there aren't a lot of regular jobs where I live, you kind of have to figure out a way to make a living doing what you love. This made me question a certain kind of ambition. The kind that is concerned with dominance. In many ways, the living is easy here. It takes no big effort to reach for the stars, they're right there.
5. I live here because many afternoons look like this:
For the rest of the reasons, head on over to Yahoo! Shine, where I'll be posting new articles about country life every thursday. Next week is "Why You Should Have Sex With Your Ex." We're very big on recycling up here in the country. You know, for the Earth.