Meditations 11:8

A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community.

The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off—through hatred, through rejection—and don't realize that they're cutting themselves off from the whole civic enterprise.

Except that we also have a gift, given us by Zeus, who founded this community of ours. We can reattach ourselves and become once more components of the whole.

But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect, and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch that's been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that's been cut off and grafted back.

"One trunk, two minds." As the gardeners put it.