We’ve had a few close calls with predators here on the backyard farm.

Yesterday I watched as a massive red tailed hawk hunkered down on the power line, its dappled chest ruffled, right above the chicken coop, lurking overhead, with a beady eye.

His tawny shoulder wings were partially spread, ready to swoop.

My flock was out of the run, free-ranging in the grass, having a great day.

But when they saw the raptor, three of my girls froze up like little chicken mannequins under the picnic table. Fiona was hiding under the deck, a little clueless.

And there was my poor Babs, standing stock still in the middle of the yard, the plumpest, heaviest and slowest (in all ways) of my birds.

Beaky mouth agape, she had a stricken look in her bright orange eye, but she was focused, not on the hawk, but on her sisters.

There was an eerie silence, a collective intake of breath, not even an insect scraping its wings.

The chickens were holding still, in suspension, for several minutes, even after I finished waving my arms and screaming like an idiot.

Later, I reflected on their response.

It was as if there was an invisible thread that linked the flock, a tensile connector between them that whispered across the line.

A bit like the yarn we used to string between tin cans to whisper across our bedroom windows in our children’s game of telephone.

In the past I have seen the flock freeze up like that, but I never saw any threat.

But of course there was, and the chickens knew it.

I marvel at the way nature interacts and moves together to protect its own.

Another example came last week, when I had my two baby Marans outside to scratch around and get acclimated to the outdoors. They are my cute black copper twins; they never leave one another’s side.

I always find them wing to wing, with their little beaks together, like they’re telling secrets.

Anyway, Huckelberry the dog, chased one across the yard, caught her and dropped her, and she quickly scrabbled underneath the chicken feeder.

She had two puncture marks on her shoulders, a little blood, but no broken wings.

As I gently inspected her and placed her back in the indoor cage, she immediately ran to her sister, as expected.

But what I noticed next surprised me. Her twin, the uninjured bird, was trembling. Her soft little body shook like I’d never seen before.

And I wondered if she felt the terror, the near escape, the trauma, of her big sister.

Sometimes it is so clear to me the way that our big, wide world is connected by tiny strings.

And the way every mood we experience travels along these invisible pathways, creating ripples of emotion.

Animals are attuned, but we humans often forget this universal language of empathy.

This week, when I read about Simone Bile’s Olympic performance, and her withdrawal from competition, I watched how the world responded.

Her message was: I am human and my mental health is an integral part of my body’s athletic pursuits. You can’t separate the two, mind and body.

And, I swear, I could feel the ripple effects of her statements throughout the mental health community.

Finally, we can talk about what is real: the strength to step away, the courage to describe vulnerability, the excruciating pain of carrying others’ burdens.

And the unnecessary shame that often accompanies us when we let people down, people we love.

And mostly, ourselves.

to be vulnerable is to be strong, to be broken is to be fully human.

For me, Simone is not letting us down, she is raising us up.

She is still the world’s best in her sport, and maybe mind-body intelligence is a reason why.

Like Naomi Osaka, these young women refuse to be defined by mens’ preoccupation with stoicism and self-punishment.

The old ideal that we must subjugate our emotional life in order to succeed, needs to be retired – like mandatory white tennis skirts for women at Wimbeldon, and bikinis on female volleyball players.

Even though these moments are just whispers on the breeze, I believe the flutterings of real change are in the wind.

And I hope that we can transmit this lesson: that to be vulnerable is to be strong, to be broken is to be fully human.

Only if we have the courage to listen, to feel empathy, and to pass the word across the wire: that we’re all in this flock together, and we’ll only get by if we take care of one another.

My chickens know it and I’m trying to figure it out too.