🎼 Early in the mornin and it’s time! For my 35th year of visits and my wife’s full life, we sit at sunrise in wonder of the natural beauty and the thousands of human lifetimes of time that the ocean has continued to batter this land. We are looking over the Atlantic Ocean only miles from the Puerto Rico trench, at the corner of the Bermuda’s Triangle! Puerto Rico was born 190 million years ago when two huge plates of Earth crashed together and volcanoes rose from the sea. The land pushed up, cracked, folded, then got covered in thick white limestone. You can still see that wild, fiery birth everywhere you look in this beautiful land. Just north, to the left of the sun, lies the Puerto Rico Trench, the Atlantic’s deepest point at roughly 8,400 meters, 27,559 ft, 5.22 miles, only 1,500 less feet than Everest! Time warp… Humans first settled Puerto Rico in the Archaic period around 2700–2400 BC (roughly 4,726–4,426 years ago) as hunter-gatherers. Saladoid farmers from South America arrived about 500–200 BC, and their descendants evolved into the Classic Taíno chiefdoms by 1200 AD. Columbus encountered these long-established Taíno societies on November 19, 1493. 533 years ago. The Spanish built Fort Escambrón, our perch above the waves, between 1771 and 1801 atop an earlier 1595 battery to guard San Juan. In 1898 Puerto Rico became a part of the USA. 128 years ago. The year my grandfather was born, and 62 years after Texas seperated from Mexico—exactly my age on Earth so far. 🤠 Today, I enjoy the fruit of all these millions of years of epic cataclysm and natural processes and think about what is mankind that God/Creator/Consciousness is mindful of us? Are we living up to the amazing potential inside every one of us — as people, as families, as keepers of this beautiful planet? Worthy questions, eh? I try to be my potential, not in thought, but in living action. I don’t know about you, but I fail, and I get up, and I try again, I think, just like you. Fight the good fight, Be who you Are, unique, complicated, gifted, blessed to live in this age and doing your best! Our children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs are counting on us to be and do our best! When they come to this place a thousand years from now, long after the memory of us, you and me is gone, will our generations be in this timeline? We can still choose to grow up together — loving more, listening more, standing together, and steering humanity toward a brighter, kinder future. We need it now, more than ever, don’t you think? I pray, and act, and am so energetically convinced that we can do it. One person, one act of kindness, piled upon another, until we all are there! I can see it in my minds eye, just around the bend of time, behind the rising sun! Can you see it too? Yes, it’s time to have a beautiful day friends! Take good care and Godspeed till we all get there, together. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mikerochelletx.substack.com