Joe Peloquin
Joe (Boundless) is dedicated to a path of listening, offering his awareness to the alive and animate earth as well as the deepest callings of the human heart. His journey seeking a life of meaning in a culture that offered few options beyond career, children and retirement began over a decade ago when he heard the longing for something more in his own heart and chose to follow it, quitting his job as a computer programmer and travelling to rural France on a one-way ticket to help a family he'd never met build their straw-bale house. What started as a young man's attempt to follow his longing through indefinite travel and work-trade deepened further when he found his way to his first Buddhist pilgrimage. This formative experience of walking the land in silence, living close to the elements in caring community, and meeting teachers who practiced the kind of compassion they preached gave him a true taste of what was possible and opened the doorway to a path of spirit and service that has shaped his life ever since.
Over the subsequent 10 years, both on his own and with his Buddhist teachers, Joe essentially lived as an unordained monk in Europe, India and the Middle East - living, serving and practicing in Buddhist and ecological communities, with weeks and months of each year spent on silent retreat and pilgrimage. He endeavors to embody compassion and service to the human and more-than-human world in simple as well as more 'radical' ways - including within the the Israel/Palestine conflict, grassroots refugee aid work, forest rehabilitation, homesteading, coal mining protests, prison systems, leprosy communities and most recently working as a guide in wilderness therapy with Open Sky. He has organized retreats and pilgrimages in India, Europe and the American Southwest and has been most recently steeped in the nature-based soul initiation work of Animas Valley Institute working directly with Bill Plotkin and other guides. His primary Buddhist teachers are Christopher Titmuss, Nathan Glyde and Zohar Lavie of the Insight Tradition and SanghaSeva.
Joe is passionate about offering mentorship and opening doors of opportunity for young people seeking a path to wholeness in themselves, meaningful bonds of kinship and intimate connection to the living earth - a path that may not be endorsed or supported by society at large. His sense of the spiritual is utterly intertwined with the practical actions needed to embody our care and callings, here and now. He is excited to be a part of the earthcraft facilitation team and work together to sow seeds of change for our time and those yet-to-come.