Certified: Learning to Repair Myself and the World in the Emerald City

Certified

Also by Kim Antieau

Novels

The Blue Tail

Broken Moon

Butch

Church of the Old Mermaids

Coyote Cowgirl

Deathmark

The Desert Siren

The Fish Wife: an Old Mermaids Novel

The Gaia Websters

Her Frozen Wild

Jewelweed Station

The Jigsaw Woman

Mercy, Unbound

The Monster’s Daughter

Ruby’s Imagine

Swans in Winter

The Rift

Whackadoodle Times

Nonfiction

Answering the Creative Call

Counting on Wildflowers

The Old Mermaids Book of Days and Nights

The Old Mermaids Book of Days and Nights: A Year and a Day Journal

An Old Mermaid Journal

The Salmon Mysteries

Under the Tucson Moon

Short Story Collections

Entangled Realities (with Mario Milosevic)

The First Book of Old Mermaids Tales

Tales Fabulous and Fairy

Trudging to Eden

Chapbook

Blossoms

Cartoons

Fun With Vic and Jane

Blog

www.kimantieau.com

Certified:

Learning to Repair Myself and

the World in the Emerald City

Kim Antieau

Published by Green Snake Publishing

Copyright (c) 2014 by Kim Antieau

Cover image copyright (c) by Tul Chalothonrangsee | Dreamstime

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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for my fellow students

Contents

Preface

How to Begin

First (Bad) Impressions

Science of Joy

In-Between

Inflexible Me, Part 1

Inflexible Me, Part 2

Jewelweed

Feeding the Dragon, Part 1

Feeding the Dragon, Part 2

Let Them Eat Cake

Getting Out

To Home

My Wound is Food

Audacious

Top of the World, Ma!

Healing

Appendix: The Wild Keeper

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

In April of 2010, I sat in my living room in front of the television and watched in horror as oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. I felt helpless. I resolved then and there to do more to help bring myself and the world back from the brink of destruction. I had done environmental and social justice work since I was a kid, but I didn’t feel as though I had achieved much of anything. I needed a new skill set. I decided to do what I usually did when I came to a crossroads in my life: go back to school.

I picked Antioch University in Seattle because it was only a four hour drive from where I lived, and it had a certificate program in ecological design. I needed 18 credits—six graduate classes—to get a certificate. For each class, I’d travel to Seattle once a month for three months for a full day. If I took two classes a semester, I’d be done in nine months.

For some loony reason, I thought going through this program would save my life, save the world, and help me get a job where I could do good work and earn a sustainable income. I am a writer, primarily a novelist, and I am a librarian. At the time I decided to go back to school, the publishing world was crashing and burning, and I was only working part-time as a librarian, selecting books from home.

What follows is my account of what happens when a 50-something woman goes back to school with the intent of saving the world and herself.

A year ago, I read this manuscript, and I quickly put it away. It felt too personal and too raw. Yet now I publish this in the hope that readers will relate to the story of someone who keeps trying, who keeps getting up—the story of someone who makes mistake after mistake and yet is learning to see her life as a success.

What happened during the year I went back to school was completely different from any of my expectations. I don’t know why I still insist on having expectations since they are never met. Maybe this is a trait of a perennial control freak. I don’t know. It was a year of magic and travail.

I don’t talk much about the professors or other students in this book. I don’t name them. I don’t name my family members either. This book isn’t about them. It’s about my mistakes, my misconceptions, my revelations. My husband, Mario Milosevic, is named. He has given me permission to name names when it comes to him. He’s always a great support to me.

Most of these chapters were culled from original pieces I posted at the time on my website. For the most part, I left them as they were originally published, but I did edit them for sense.

By the way, this is a story about me going to school to study permaculture and sustainable food systems, but it is not a book on permaculture or sustainable food systems. There are many great books on those topics. Check out some of the titles in my bibliography to get started.

Best wishes,

Kim Antieau

How To Begin

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day 2010, causing the worst environmental disaster in our country’s history, I didn’t know what to do. I was angry and depressed as I watched the disaster unfold. No one seemed to know what to do. I wondered, Where are all the smart people who can fix stuff like this?

Of course, stuff like this should have never happened in the first place. After decades of lax regulations and a kind of legal deification of big corporations, environmental and economic disasters were happening with increased frequency. We couldn’t deny it.

What could I do? I called the President. I called my elected officials. I begged them to do something about the oil pouring into the Gulf. I asked them to stop relying on information from British Petroleum. I felt like I was watching one of those dystopian novels I had read as a teenager: like in Brave New World or 1984 where the corporations are the government and if they tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.

I suddenly felt as though I had no useful skills. I was a writer and librarian. I had written a novel in response to Hurricane Katrina (Ruby’s Imagine), but I couldn’t see that it had changed anything in our world.

I worked part-time from home as a selector for our library. When the district remodeled the library where I was branch manager a few years back, I got sick from the chemical outgassing and hadn’t been able to work full-time away from home since.

I had been a social and environmental activist most of my life, starting when I was in elementary school trying to save killdeer nests from marauding boys. But I couldn’t point to any successes. Obviously my methods weren’t working.

And I couldn’t see how my skills as writer, librarian, or activist could help at this moment in history.

While oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of the state where I was born, I felt the bell jar of depression and anxiety begin to fall.

One night I couldn’t sleep. I had advocated for a sea change in this country for some time. As a culture, we seemed soullessly consumptive. I remembered recently being at a workshop where the facilitator figuratively shook her finger at us and told us we needed to change how we looked at the world; we needed to change our lives.

I grew quite irritated with her. How dare she tell me, a grown woman, how I should live my life? In that moment, I understood how other people probably felt when I began ranting about our consumer culture, the perils of capitalism, our dependence upon fossil fuels, or whatever other lecture I was giving to someone who had not asked for one.

I didn’t want to lecture anymore. It wasn’t effective. I didn’t want to battle anymore either. It was absolutely ineffective. We couldn’t sit around waiting for the government to tell us what to do. We couldn’t wait for anyone to tell us what to do. No more waiting. No more talking.

But what could I actually do now?

I needed some practical skills.

I wanted to learn how people could live on this planet in our cities or out in the country and still be a part of the environment—not apart from it, not pariahs amongst the wild, but a part of the whole ecological community. Then I could help create places that were energy efficient and safe and healthy to human inhabitants and the surrounding environment.

I sat on the couch with my computer in front of me and began looking for places where I could learn these kinds of skills. I didn’t want to get another master’s degree; I already had two. I didn’t want a Ph.D. I couldn’t afford it, and I wasn’t interested in teaching.

In the middle of the night, after hours of searching, I stumbled upon a nine-month certificate program in ecological planning and design in Seattle, Washington, two hundred plus miles north of where I lived. The program included electives in permaculture and food systems, another area of interest for me.

The next morning I talked it over with Mario. If I took the program over the next year, we could probably afford it if we got a loan, unless something drastic happened to our incomes. As I talked about it, I wondered if I was crazy.

When I was younger, I knew I was smart. I was sure that meant I could always take care of myself. When I got sick, all that assurance went out the window. Now I knew I could easily be one of those people who ended up homeless and living on the street. For some time, I had been looking for a way to get a more steady income—more steady than intermittent writing income—without changing my beliefs about living and working sustainably.

Maybe going back to school could do that for me. But I didn’t want to drain my family—Mario and me—of any more of our finances.

What if going to school was just one more way to educate myself uselessly?

I made phone calls to the school and spoke with an advisor at admissions. We talked about the certificates. I told her my concerns about going to school and spending all this money and then not getting a job out of it. She didn’t have a real answer to that. What could she say? I guarantee you’ll find work. That would have been nice, but it wouldn’t have been honest.

Next I told her I only wanted to go to school if it was a green campus. She said it was. They didn’t use pesticides, and they used green building practices: no-VOC paints and carpets (when carpeting was needed). She told me it was an old building, but they did the best they could.

I then wrote to the permaculture course instructor. I told him my life history in about a page: about my health, my grief over the state of the world, and my inability to figure out how to make a meaningful contribution. After I sent the email, I was embarrassed. How could I so easily tell a stranger about my life? I wasn’t sure why I did it. I wanted these people to know life had not been easy for me. Illness and financial woes had taken a toll. But mostly I wanted them to know I hadn’t succeeded at making anything better in the world, despite my best efforts.

I didn’t tell him everything, of course. I didn’t say that I struggled with anxiety and depression. Didn’t tell him that sometimes incessant worry possessed me like some demented neurotic demon that I couldn’t shake loose no matter what I did.

I didn’t tell anyone these things, so why would I tell him?

I’d always had a touch of anxiety, even when I was a kid. When I was in my early twenties, I caught a glimpse of my diagnosis in the file on my shrink’s desk: chronic depression. When I saw those two words, I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach. It sounded like a life sentence: chronic depression. Chronic meant it would never go away, right?

In my mid-twenties, a doctor told me I had something called environmental illness. She said I was essentially allergic to the world. This was devastating news. I loved the world. Now it was making me sick? I had to change everything about my life, she said. The way I ate, drank, dressed, lived.

I stopped drinking. I began eating organic foods. I tried to lessen my stress and take time to relax, but I was in college, working nearly full-time while going to school full-time. I didn’t know how to relax.

The diagnosis evolved over the years. What I had was now called multiple chemical sensitivities. (This is essentially what the workers and some residents in the Gulf now have. The doctors call it tilt: toxicant induced loss of tolerance.)

I didn’t like any of the diagnoses I’d gotten over the years. They all felt like a curse, a life-sentence. As I tried to protect myself from the world, my life felt more and more constrained. Less and less joyful.

And my incessant worrying got worse, coming and going until it seemed to settle in good and hard after my mother died two and a half years before I went back to school. Maybe that was because I started eating less healthy. Maybe it was because I had also lost two very close friends two years before that. Maybe it was because of the two surgeries I had had, although they had cleared my sinuses so that I could actually breathe through my nose for the first time in nearly fifteen years.

Maybe it was because I was now in my fifties and I felt like half of my life had been spent in illness. More than half.

I didn’t know why I had this chronic anxiety. Doctors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, craniosacral therapists, all kinds of therapists, and shamans had not been able to help. It started to feel as though this unsustainable part of myself was hard-wired and there was no way to riven it from my real self—because I was sure my real true self did not cower in fear or anxiety because she couldn’t get her mind right.

In any case, after the permaculture instructor read my email (where I didn’t mention my anxiety), he asked me to call him. So I did.

We talked about his permaculture class and the program at his university. I told him I had worked on many environmental projects. I had also been part of the Sanctuary movement when I lived on the coast of Oregon—on the fringes of it while I was in a peace group there. I had organized and marched against the war in Iraq. I had sued my county after they illegally sprayed pesticides in front of my house. I had fought many battles, and I was tired. He talked about cultivating resilience. With my voice shaking with tears, I said, I feel as though I have no more resilience.

I promise you at the end of this, he said, you will find your resilience again.

Maybe those weren’t his exact words. But they were good words. I felt better. Like maybe this was for me.

As we talked, I felt as though I was speaking with someone who was like-minded. I realized I wanted to be around people who shared my world view again and who were willing to work for their communities. I didn’t want to lead anyone anywhere or teach anyone anything. Not right now. I wanted to learn new skills. I wanted to learn to make a living doing something meaningful.

After our conversation concluded, I filled out an online application for the graduate certificate program. Part of the application included a five page essay about who I was and why I was drawn to this program.

I also filled out a financial aid form called FAFSA. I wasn’t eligible for any grants—there weren’t many for graduate students—but I might be eligible for a loan.

It was strange filling out the applications. To see once again where I’d been. Got