The “Way” of TiLT

TiLT seeks to live a spirit-led, earth-honoring, people-dignifying, empire-resisting, justice-seeking, despair-erasing Way of life.

For us, this Way of life is…

Grounded in Community

We aim to live in close relationship to one another, and function as much as possible as an extended family -- observing community practices such as mutual aid, table fellowship, and sharing in work, play, and hardship. We try to be respectful of boundaries, encourage each other’s best selves, help each other in personal and professional development, and be willing to agree and disagree in love. We do a lot of projects together on the land—this season, we grew a lot of food, made some adobe bricks, laid two patios, and improved a lot of soil. In recent years we’ve done things like lay radiant floors and construct adobe walls, greenhouses, an adobe bread oven, deyhydrators, composters, and worm bins.

Informed by 12 Step Recovery

12 step programs have helped millions of people overcome their addictions, transform their harmful lifestyles, and change their habits for the better. We at TiLT use these programs as a model for how we too may change our habits to live a better life.  We acknowledge ourselves to be addicts -- victims of affluenza, petroleum addiction, and unhealthy individualism. Despite our professed values of love and peace and justice, we compulsively make choices that are unfair, unjust, and unhealthy for our world. We need serious help, and cannot do it alone.

Affluenza: extreme materialism and consumerism associated with the pursuit of wealth and success and resulting in a life of chronic dissatisfaction, debt, overwork, stress, and impaired relationships.

Inspired by Just Transition

We want to be part of the world-wide shift from an extractive, colonizing economy to a regenerative economy. This means a shift from dirty energy to clean energy democracy, from funding highways to expanding public transit, from incinerators and landfills to zero waste, from industrial food systems to food sovereignty, from land grabs to community land rights, from wage-slave jobs to jobs with dignity, and from rampant development to ecosystem restoration. A Just Transition is the process of getting from where we are to where we need to be— transforming systems of economics and governance both large and small. A just transition requires moving from a globalized capitalist industrial economy to linked, local, participatory economies that provide well-being for all. If humanity is going to thrive together in the near future, this transition is inevitable. Justice is not. Communities impacted first and worst must guide the transition to ensure it is just.

Marked by Service

TiLT members contribute significant amounts of time to service within the community and to service in the surrounding region. Rather than isolate themselves in a "bubble," members of TiLT live in close proximity to human and environmental need. Current residents focus their service work in the fields of education, homelessness, environmental justice and community building.

Steeped in the Peace Church Tradition

TiLT is grounded in the deep "peace church" tradition of Mennonites, Amish, Quakers, and other radical peacemakers. Like them, we seek to live community-centered lives of active reconciliation, mutual aid, simplicity, and justice making. This movement, while imperfect, has for 500 years practiced the ethos “live simply so others can simply live” and embodied non-violent alternatives to the coercion, retribution, colonization, extraction and exploitation that runs rampant through our society. TiLT Founder Todd Wynward is a licensed Mennonite minister for Environmental Justice, and TiLT is in loose affiliation with Taos UCC, Albuquerque Mennonite Church and with Mountain States Mennonite Conference, and with the statewide eco-faith organization NM Interfaith Power & Light.

Inspired by the Watershed Way

Wendell Berry suggests we take Jesus’ famous words and root them in our home places: ‘Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.’ These phrase is the motto of the Watershed Way.

We know our watershed to be our mother, teacher, corrector, and sustainer. We are hyper-mobile, displaced. post-modern people addicted to conspicuous consumption, but we hold out hope that we might learn to treat our region as rabbi. We seek to become ecologically literate and practice sustainable, humble actions as we learn what it means to re-inhabit a specific place once again as one citizen among many. Following the place-based examples and wisdom of historic Pueblo peoples and Hispanic acequia culture, we seek to shape our lives, habits, schedules and tastebuds around the seasons of northern New Mexico, and by the bounty and the boundaries of our Taos bioregion.