Back in the 1970s, whenever I felt the excitement of a new idea or a new adventure, I would play my vinyl recording of Bob Dylan’s New Morning on our old turntable. Some days, I’d play it over and over, belting out “so happy just to be alive, underneath the sky of blue, on this new morning, new morning…” along with the music.  

I am a reader, and much of my work is informed by my reading — everything from Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland.

Viewers often ask me why there are so many circles in the Seeds of Change series. Are they planets? The sun? Round seeds? Well, yes. All of these things. But also something more

My thoughts about the universality of life and matter led to my use of the circle as a symbol for feelings of connectedness. For many centuries, the circle and sphere have been linked to transcendence, vastness, and connectedness. Generation after generation, thinkers have used circles and spheres as metaphors for concepts of infinity, immeasurable space, timelessness, connectedness, oneness with God or with nature.

In his 1841 essay, “Circles.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end” and “Our life is an apprenticeship to truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”