300 million years ago

As soon as I saw this artist's reconstruction of the early Permian forest in Mongolia—a time so distant that it was long before the dinosaurs, and what is now northern China was located in the tropics—I thought it needed a deity. To me, there's something spiritually compelling about those strange columnar trees, 80 feet tall with grassy crests and clusters of brown cones, and that understory of huge ferns, 20 feet tall with 8-feet-long fronds. It's otherworldly—and yet it was our world, a very long time ago.

So I gave the forest the young Krishna, avatar of Vishnu. One of Krishna's names is Gopala, which means "protector of cows."

Cut-paper collage postcard. Painting of forest by Ren Yugao. Painting of Krishna and cows by B. G. Sharma. Cheap paper of Discover magazine is why you can see ghosts of the other side. I should've put a black layer underneath it. Ah well...the joys of old-school cut-and-paste.

300 million years is the usual figure for how old sharks are. There were primitive sharks in the seas of this time period. (If you don't know this about me, I'm a shark freak.)