We are the ones we're looking for | Beyond Suburbia | Making Sustainable Real!

By Brian Skeele, on July 19th, 2011

The Great American Quest, ” life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has led us to the mountain top, the shopping mall. We sat there in rapture, beaming and gleaming in the sunlight streaming into the food court, all the abundance of our bags full of awesome stuff. We filled our homes up with the awesome stuff, and then we filled up our storage units.

And we find ourselves still waiting for the rapture. We set up ingenious manufacturing supply systems, global supply routes of mining, processing and sculpting our planet’s resources to fill the shelves of the malls, as if we lived in infinite abundance.

Somehow, I was blessed with eyes to see, and ears to listen, “the emperor has no clothes”, well at most he’s wearing a Speedo. I chose a path less followed, a path I once judged as kind of spineless, “a weed in the wind”, a wandering around, trying to find my own pursuit of happiness….

It’s become an inner journey, a daily surrender to the unknown. I wake up in a new world, unknown adventures awaiting. And I take steps forward. What I discover, every day, is I am the one I am looking for. Miraculous connections occur, something magnificent is unfolding.

What I find inside is peace… And a calling. “What else can we do besides suburbia?” has become my outer quest, fueled by my inner fire.

And what comes forward, over and over again,  is a knowing; a vision of a quality filled lifestyle, where we are living in balance with our planet. I search for signs of this sustainable reality outside, and over and over again, I just get bits and pieces.  I find I have the capacity to put these pieces together like a 3 dimensional puzzle, and it’s a wondrous, awesome place to live, a community filled with others who also are living from their inner knowing, their inner quest.

From my experience, this living in the world from the inside, is challenging. It takes courage to mine the depths, the shadows, the judgements, the fears that lurk inside as well. What I’ve learned, and continue to learn, is the more I go into those places,  and bring my compassion to whatever is present, the more freedom, joy, and mastery shows up.

My defining question has evolved from “What else can we do besides suburbia?” into “How do we make sustainable neighborhoods real?”  And thus here you are. reading www.beyondsuburbia.com, one of the steps I’ve taken down this path to sustainableville.  See you at the stop at the Transit Oriented Development Station. Jump on board! Together, we can make sustainable real!

Are you looking for me?

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

you will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine

rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding

around your own neck, nor ineating nothing but

vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me

instantly —

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

~Kabir

Image courtesy of LaVidaBoca