Jessamyn captured the Free Wi-Fi splash screen of a Unitarian church in Portland. After noting that the church is a liberal community of faith, it invites you to "reach out to the world with a message of healing, hope and transformation."

I'm currently using a linksys community network somewhere in Somerville, MA, and I've done nothing to earn this connection. I'm in a similar boat to the users of that church's Wi-Fi. As a result, I'd like to reach out to you all with a message of healing, hope and transformation.

First, healing. I'm reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It documents bizarre cases of neurological diseases—for example, where a woman loses her proprioception (or sense of body position), or "witty ticcy Ray," a manic drummer with Tourette's—but, in many of the cases, Sacks helps the patient learn how to cope and become functional. The woman who lost her proprioception, for example, was able to cope by using her vision to keep track of her limbs by focusing hard on them. Sacks is a clear and enjoyable writer with a lot of great stories to tell. I'm glad that these people can be somewhat healed, but even more compelling is the sense he conveys of what a human being can be, even though lost of memory or possessed with wild outbursts like witty ticcy Ray.

As for hope, I read this from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of his time in Auschwitz:

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.

When it comes to transformation, I point you at Miranda July's book of wonderful short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Nearly every protagonist in the book undergoes a transformation. I think particularly of the man in "The Sister," who works at a leather-goods factory and for whom, "The new life came easily after this, a growl." To find out after what you will, of course, have to read the book.