Cyclical Nature of Life: Concept

So, for this project we had to interpret what the Cyclical Nature of Life meant to us. Since Life in itself is cyclical I wanted to take the Buddhist concept of rebirth and interpret that into my view of life. For every life we live we always seek for perfection. The concept of perfection differs, however, depending on where you were born, how you were raised, and the environment that you live in. To visually represent this concept will be the tricky part, however, I do have a basic idea of how I want to represent this concept.
I want to make the image a bit surreal. Taking the techniques of surrealism and incorporating them into the concept and process. I want to use the tree as a representation of life, with each limb representing a different life lived, not necessarily a human life, since in Buddhism, we can even come back as animals. I have a lot of pictures of different animals and different concepts of 'perfection' throughout history and I want to use them to represent what perfection meant to those people or animals at the time.