Together

By A History of Kindness - Kirstie McKinnon | Posted: Tuesday Dec 02, 2025

After I wrote Shining Cuckoos, Grey Warblers: trust and infinity I started to ask myself a risky question: am I like the cuckoo? Risky, because it feels much safer to align with the heroic, stoic and prettily-singing grey warbler. And yet. Acknowledgement of need?If there’s something the cuckoo doesn’t question, its dependence.

I’ve been reading Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. This bookhas sent me back into the garden. There solace, beauty and tangled mess there, in all of it co-existing. Here is what Ross Gay has to say about in dependence:

“... no matter how much you earn or stash or hoard or bunker up, no matter even your fleet of spaceships, you will never be self-sufficient or independent. Because nothing living is … In fact, in addition to the fact that we all die, the most salient or unifying feature of we the living is that we cannot survive without help.”
~ Ross Gay from Inciting Joy.

I depend on the on-going exchange of writing and reading. This is survival for me. Nourishment and navigation through the ocean-land-sky of life.

I started to write a process journal for the last post. It was like a cake without baking powder, and maybe without play. Instead, I wondered: what if I asked some of the writers I depend on, whose work sustains me, to share work which relates to all of this: connection, in dependence, togetherness?

So here is some of the work which has nourished me, shared with permission.

Continue Reading: Together - by Kirstie McKinnon - A History of Kindness