Nothing is born — things branch

Draw the worms of a mother and her child on the same sheet and you cannot find the place where a new thing starts. The child's worm does not begin in open space beside hers; it separates out of her, the way a branch leaves a trunk without anything being created at the joint.

Follow that back and no worm in the whole tree has a free end at the early side. Every one of them is a branch of an older one. Which means birth, drawn in four dimensions, is not an origin. It is a parting. The tradition has its own version of this instinct — a shattering that scattered rather than a manufacture that began — and the Kabbalah is unusually comfortable with the idea that beginnings are re-descriptions of separations.