Franklin Taggart's Blog

I listened to a podcast the other day in which two women were talking about their success online, which apparently had something to do with something called content. In the course of the 50 or so minutes they were talking, the word "content" was spoken between 5 and ten times a minute. Content, content, content. Creating content, content marketing, content, content, content, more content. This generic term has come to mean less and less, and it leaves a taste in my mouth comparable to that brought about by the generic beer I tried after the high school football game all those years ago. I can still bring the taste to mind, and it isn't a fond memory. It used to be that people wrote articles, or stories, or songs, or screenplays, or they made films, or wore out their dad's Super 8mm camera, spending their hard earned lawn mowing cash on getting those films developed, then splicing their masterpieces together on the kitchen table with a pair of scissors and Scotch

Many astronauts have talked about the experience of looking at Earth from space, and a cognitive shift that has been called the Overview Effect. There is a great video that highlights this effect. It features one of my childhood heroes, Edgar Mitchell who died a few months ago. If you have 19 minutes to enrich your life, please take the time now, and enjoy!(full screen viewing recommended) OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo . This Wikipedia article has more information. There is one being. Our sense of separation from everything else is a thought created illusion. It doesn't exist. Our experiences of individuality, with a personal mind, personal awareness, personal thinking, identification with the body, and sense of self importance all fall away. They're sentient. Life itself is held within a greater context of being. That context shows us the folly of our quests to dominate, manipulate and control nature.

Long's Peak and Mount Meeker in the distance Yesterday I gave a talk at Unity of Fort Collins on the common thread that is shared by creativity, service, and thriving. I'll post the talk another time, but for now I want to share a parable that flew in as I was preparing. Before the Western U.S. was settled, an explorer made his way across the plains and found himself approaching the Rocky Mountains. He'd run out of water the day before, and he was looking for a water source. As he walked he met a trapper whose canvas water bag was full to almost bursting. He asked the trapper if he wouldn't mind filling his canteen. The trapper agreed. The explorer took a long drink of water, and he'd never tasted anything so fresh in his life. He immediately felt restored, and he asked the trapper where to find the source of the water. The trapper pointed at a faraway peak and said, "At the bottom of the highest peak there is a lake. That is the source." The explorer expr