Reflections by Kaila Allen-Posin

*Note from Lily: A week after my dad died, our dear friend Kaila (Binney) Allen-Posin spoke this piece at a https://acupofkarma.com/the-empty-cup event here on Martha’s Vineyard Island, and she generously said, "of course!" to my request to share it with all of you.

Kaila writes: "There is this terrible saying, “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.” Turns out it was George Bernard Shaw in 1903. We could unpack that idiom for eons to come, but instead I would simply suggest that what I have learned as the child of educators and as an educator myself, is that it is quite possible that it is not until we teach that we truly understand whatever it is we are doing. The teaching doesn’t have to be in a classroom - in fact I have a pretty strong aversion to traditional classrooms - but the process requires that we demystify a particular subject matter and allow it to be accessed from a new perspective.

My introduction to agriculture came by way of teaching. It was a roundabout way to get there, but today it all makes sense. In my twenties I had studied and did research abroad in ecovillages (in Senegal, India, Israel and Scotland), and a term kept coming up with which I was unfamiliar - the term was “permaculture”. If agriculture, or farming, hadn’t drawn me in yet, permaculture did - it was defined to me as a theory developed in 1980 as a conscious reaction to industrial agriculture and consumer society. Permaculture is a design science through which we can create closed-loop, self-sustaining living systems. From homestead to ecovillage to green cities, it offers us ways to envision and implement hope amidst what can feel like an overwhelming amount of environmental and societal challenges.

While I was living and researching in India, I was asked by one of the ecovillage founders if I could come back to teach a permaculture course. “I’ve never taken even taken one!”, I replied. Nobody seemed to care. I was fascinated and inspired by the idea and I came home to the Vineyard that summer to discover there was a man teaching the first ever permaculture course here on the island. He was teaching out of the youth hostel, and most of the course seemed to be visiting various sites on the island that modeled aspects of this design science. The island, I soon discovered, was like permaculture heaven.

On the first day I walked into the youth hostel to see my 6th grade teacher, Sidney Morris, in the kitchen. He had been my advisor during the first two years of the Charter School’s existence, and from this moment on he would continue to be my advisor throughout my life. Those first years at the Charter School were wild, and inspiring. Sidney, and the staff, shared an experience of what school could look like if it were created for children and not for efficiency. Spending two years of middle school there made quite an impact, though the full extent of that impact had not yet surfaced when I ran into Sidney that day.

It had been at least a decade, if not more, since we had seen each other and we spent some time catching up. I shared how surprised I was that given the abundance of resilient agriculture systems on the island there had not been a permaculture course offered here until now. This teacher came all the way fromTexas!

Sidney looked at me and said, “You should teach it.” Again, I hadn’t even taken the permaculture course itself let alone a permaculture teaching certificate class. I told him I thought that was a bit crazy, but I do think there should be someone local teaching the course given the focus on observing and understanding the patterns of a specific geographical location. “Think about it", said Sidney, and smiled in the way he did when he knew a bit more than he was giving away.

Sidney, it turned out, was helping the Texan permaculture teacher by connecting him to various people and places around the island, helping to steer the ship. This tended to be one of his many roles on the island - a connector. The spider that spins the web, that sees the unseen and brings it towards the center. He was crucial to the spread of this agricultural concept.

The course allowed me to see the island, my home, through this new perspective, and for that it was invaluable. But to be frank, I felt like it could have been so much more - I was left with wanting more. I still had so much to learn about resilient agricultural systems. So I started researching permaculture teaching courses, found one at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur later in the year, and I signed up.

After another ten days of learning all that I don’t know, I was heading back to India, to that same community, to teach. It was my first experience teaching, and it was one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I doubted myself the entire time, and questioned this path as a teacher. When the course was over I almost stayed in India indefinitely- not to teach, but to keep learning all that I felt I didn’t know. But there was something pulling me back home, so I returned and quickly started putting some pieces together for permaculture courses.

As I tread through the path of those years in my twenties when “purpose” felt like a never-ending search, I continued on this path of education. The Martha’s Vineyard Vision Fellowship was still in its early years, and as I sought ways to pursue my own education with the intention to bring it back to the island, I met its goal. At the same moment I fell back in love with my high school sweetheart, who also happened to be a farmer. I knew our lives would keep us here forever, and my educational path would only help support my future here.

At this time, Sidney was now the Education Director at the Farm Institute, and I asked him to be my mentor through the Vision Fellowship. We met many times through the winter of 2009 while I applied to a Masters program at Antioch New England - the program was called Education for Sustainability. As Sidney and I worked through our ideas, he would always guide me back to what I ultimately wanted to do - connect myself and others to the land, the animals, the systems we depend upon and that depend on us.

I started an Adult Education Program at The Farm Institute that summer as my Masters Practicum, and taught various pieces of the larger permaculture curriculum to adults - natural building, compost systems, animal husbandry. I was offered this wide open space by Sidney, just as I had been offered at the Charter School, to simply explore. I explored what it felt like to be a teacher, what it felt like to learn so deeply through teaching, and what it felt like to connect to this island as a “grown up.”

I moved from teaching adults, to then establishing a teen program with Sidney, to working with children, and ultimately following the path all the way down to toddlers. My sister and I had both pursued a Masters in Education, feeling called to continue the legacy of our parents in the public school system. But as we started raising our own children our perspective on the education system widened, and we were challenged by what felt like endless limitations. We also realized how much we wanted to be with our children as they grew, how important we felt it was for them to know their island, their community, and keep them connected to the world outside of concrete school walls.

My years at the Charter School with Sidney resurfaced, sometimes daily, as I envisioned a dream education for my children. I remembered walking into his room at 12 years old, sitting down with him at a round table, and being asked what I wanted to learn. He handed me paper, and I was able to make up my entire schedule. That year, I created a complex written language with my friend, walked to Scott Campbell’s pottery studio through the woods every week to create art, and sat on cozy couches speaking French with Sidney’s daughter Lily and our teacher Sylvie Delauney. We played hours and hours of jacks on the floor of the school, learned how to freeze Arizona Ice Teas in the kitchen freezer, hiked and camped in the Vermont winter.

One day, a few months in, I thought to myself, “I think I should learn math.” I remember this moment because it was my choice, an opportunity I sought, and Sidney was there to guide me. He pointed me in the direction of Jeannie, a small, round British woman with white hair that matched her white lab coat she wore every day. “She’ll teach you math,” he said. She handed me a packet of algebra problems, and Lily sat with me to explain how to solve for “x”. This was my introduction to math, and to this day it is my favorite subject. I joke that Calculus was the best part of high school - but it is not really a joke.

When I envision learning, these are the experiences I see, and what I want for my children. So as my sister and I dreamed, I reached out to Sidney to be the first of our “council of elders” as we developed our school (or “unschool” as we have called it). For the next 8 years he remained a council of one, because he was really all we needed. He was there to remind us, when we were challenged by friends and family and the world around us, what we were creating, and why we were creating it. He wove a web around us - connecting us to people in the community, places to visit, the land, the sea - and the children were held by this web. They still are. At the center of the web is our farm.

The farm guides us through the seasons: the rhythms of our days, our weeks, and our years are all in alignment with the paths of the wind, the water, the creatures that flow across our site, our needs and the needs of the animals we tend to. There have been moments when I wonder, as my children grow, what if this isn’t enough? What if I am not enough? What if the farm is not enough? Sidney remained our guide, our mentor. He visited us every few weeks to say “thank you.” After having established multiple alternative schools on the island, it was so deeply fulfilling for him to see this unschool in the woods on the farm continue to thrive. I would laugh and thank him - for without him my feet would not be rooted on this island, or on this farm.

The greatest gift the farm offers is the opportunity to witness the cycle of life, on a daily basis. I remember the first time I was with a group of my students during lambing and a stillborn was lying in the hay next to its twin, who was happily nursing from its mother. My first reaction was to cover it up with hay and come back to it later, alone. I remember Sidney always reminding me of the profound wisdom of the children - “Let them guide you”, he said, “Let them lead.” The children saw the dead lamb immediately and their instinct was not fear, but love. They wanted to go to it, to hold it, to name it, and to give it a ceremonial burial. So we did, and we continue to do this with each animal we witness dying on the farm.

With Sidney, there were always new boundaries to cross - personal, societal, emotional - and this became even more profoundly clear over the past year. In June of 2023, Sidney’s physical pain had reached a place where he needed to pause and be home, mostly in bed. He was on a healing journey, which he named as such, and was exploring what this next moment in his life offered him. He asked that people come see him, because he refused to take any pain medication. He said that people were his pain remediation. Their stories, their presence, were all he needed.

He was challenged by this approach to his healing journey, just as he had been challenged in every one of his new ideas and creations in life. And yet even in this moment of what by most could have been considered his weakest, he shared his overwhelming strength and wisdom, and his wildest innovation yet - death as something completely new and different. As he approached his own mortality, he inspired others to wonder about life. He welcomed me and my children, among many others, into his home, to sit with him, and engage in the wonderment of life. Just as he did when he was out in the community, in his van, in his Wanderbus: connecting and building his web.

He spent over a year in his bed, and I was able to visit him frequently, sometimes weekly, sharing what we were witnessing in the world outside. A world he helped create. It felt like he had started an entirely new life there, it was magical to be with him, enlightening of course, but also so fun. I was still learning so much from him, sharing ideas about school on the farm, getting more book recommendations from him. The children would draw and paint. We would sing. It began to feel like a party, an ongoing celebration of life.

A little over a week ago, he died. And I followed the waves of all of the emotions that came along with losing him. I wanted to just cover it up, like the lamb, and pretend it didn’t happen, coming back to it when I was ready. And yet there were the children, coming from their place of love, not fear. They wanted to wonder about him, and go to him, and be in this mysterious space of loss. For me, farming is all of what Sidney guided me towards - the exploration of the things we don’t know, the never-ending cycle of learning, and teaching, and ultimately the space of loss. And where loss takes us is where farming takes us - to new life. So thank you, Sidney, for guiding me here, and for wherever this takes me."