Last week, Ron brought this beautiful egg to me and said it reminded him of a picture of the universe he had just seen online. He said it made the egg even more beautiful to him.

“We are all made of stars,” I said.

And then he showed me the picture of the universe he saw, and it was remarkably like the spots on the beautiful egg our little Faure lays. I couldn’t share that exact photograph because it is copyrighted, but I found this older picture of the universe. The one you see here was taken by the Hubble telescope in 2009. The patterns on Faure’s egg are so similar to the photo of the universe, and this connection Ron pointed out to me made me think about just how much humans have in common with animals around us, and this was something I didn’t fully understand until I became a farmer. Living so closely with animals helps me understand that humans aren’t that special and yet we are so, so special.

We are all made of star stuff–carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and such–ALL of us. I think most humans think we are special but forget that elephants, dogs, chickens, and ducks who like Bach are made of the same stuff. So many people think we are so different from the animals around us. For a long time, western science said so too. Science is catching up to the truth, I think, but of course, some people have known all along. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about the Potawatomi language having words for plants and animals that would translate as things like “tree people” and “horse people.”

In the ten years I have been watching my chickens live their lives in their little community on our farm, I have seen how they make friends, mourn for each other, have people they don’t like, snuggle each other, argue with each other, fight with each other. They are social creatures. They worry. They anticipate. Some of them make cross species connections to me. I see how most of them go along with the crowd. There are some unusual ones who struggle to fit in with the crowd. There can be a price to be paid for not fitting in too. Doesn’t this sound familiar? In so many ways, we are all the same–different scale, different levels of it, but the same stuff.

In the past, when I have tried to tell people this, I have been dismissed, even laughed at, reminded that we can’t “humanize animals,” which is frustrating, especially given the research on chicken intelligence. I have seen some people even seem offended that I would compare humans to chickens.

But it’s magical to me that we all have so much in common, that we are all so similar. There are pattens in Nature that repeat everywhere. Nature is efficient like that. If it works, it works. And we all have those patterns in our cells–in the fabric of who we are. It binds us, does it not?

That’s the magic in this world, and I think we miss this too much. But it’s there, right in front of us–just waiting for us to pay attention to it.