Painted in my first year of art school, this piece came to me as I was praying to be able to create a mandala to meditate on.

I started painting a traditional Yin Yang symbol and I visualized it becoming this series of circles within circles that I felt myself flying into. 

Twenty years later, the day after my mom passed away, I was holding it and saw that it was a self-portrait of sorts.  If I was the largest circle, there were my mom and dad in the next largest circles within me.  Their parents were within them and so on, making this a genealogy symbol that begins to look a little like DNA.

Years later, people who saw it gave me more meanings.  One physics professor told me that even the smallest imaginable circle continued dividing infinitely, making it not just a symbol for infinity but of infinite infinities (within one).  A philosopher who saw it said it symbolized the Golden Mean, or the synthisis of thesis and antithesis.  A Taoist told me that the center line was the "Middle Path" between the extremes.  And a Buddhist explained that by seeing our genealogy going back indefinitely, we can see our familial relationship to all life.