To a dear friend and co-conspirator

Pain and sorrow, when genuinely felt, is the bedrock of constructive will. The sadness you feel over Valeria's fate reveals the depth of the friendship you share. That friendship is worth more to many than any palace of success. We build palaces of glass and indeed they may easily shatter. Such a friendship cannot shatter; nor can it crumble, for it is the earth itself. Feel the pain, embrace the sadness, and recognize that your roots in this earth thus expand. And from great roots, and from them alone may the tallest and the strongest trees grow. We all must choose our forest, our land, the place and space into which our branches will spread and also from which we will take our share of light. Fortunately for us, in the abstract landscape of our "existence" there is no scarcity or limit to how much light we may receive or release. Unlike our cousins in the forest, we need not dwarf and starve our neighbor in the service of capturing light for our own growing branches. This is miraculous. It is the infinity made possible by our minds. And we have already given it a name:  soul. All these souls are ours, are us. Not every soul will touch the infinite in life, but those who can feel the deepest pain also may realize the nearest sensation to that which we also named, as God. Although our most recent physicists may have demonstrated that every action does not actually have an equal and opposite reaction, Newton and his contemporaries were not far off. And thus, I advise you to take heart in the likelihood that the depth of your pain--over Valeria, over anything that is truly hurting you--may yield a creative recoil of similar depth or height. Channel that energy. If you feel the spontaneous need to translate your sorrow, or your happiness or your breakthrough, do so, as I do now in this soliloquy. Only from that rootbase of emotional energy can we move in ways that will move others. I'm excited at what you will do, and amazed at what you already have done. Not bad for a kid from Winston. ...takes one to know one ;).