He Shall Neither Slumber Nor Sleep
Psalm 121:4Nursery
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170 gsm archival matte paper, ships rolled
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One lamp left burning while the house rests
In daylight it is simply a landscape. Long hills holding the edge of a valley, the fields below still in shadow, the sky going pale at the low end. Nothing in it is in a hurry.
Look a moment longer and there is the lamp, small and warm, somewhere down in the sleeping valley. Someone is awake with it, or someone up on the hills has been awake all along. It gives the room a steady place for your eyes to land, and it holds that place at four in the morning as surely as at four in the afternoon.
One friend sees the hour before anyone is up, and someone already keeping watch. Another sees only hills over a valley that is still asleep and says it feels like somewhere she has been. Your mother notices the lamp and says nothing for a while. They are all looking at the same picture, in a home where the quiet is kept on purpose.
The light arrives before the morning does
I keep coming back to the lamp. It is the smallest thing here, one warm point low in the valley, and somehow the hills lean toward it rather than over it. The fields are still holding the night. The sky at the far edge has already given itself away.
What I love is that nothing has happened yet. The morning is one step away, not here. My hope is that whoever lives with this looks up in the dark part of the night and finds the hills exactly where she left them, the lamp still burning, someone else holding the watch, and lays her head back down.
The room you are really decorating for yourself
You are putting the room together in the last weeks, and somewhere in it you admit that decorating the nursery is for you. You wanted a warm, soothing colour and something to look at while you feed him in the middle of the night. So this goes where your eyes already go, not where the visitors look.
And there is the grandmother, with a daughter who says she truly does not want stuff, that she has everything she needs and no space for more. A painting is not more stuff. It stays on the wall, it moves with the child to the next room years from now, and it carries the thing she has been praying over that house without saying it out loud.
It hangs beside the feeding chair rather than over the cot, at the height of someone sitting down, with 45 x 60 cm framed being the size that fills a bare nursery wall.
What comes to the door
- 170 gsm matte paper Uncoated, printed to its edges, no shine under a lamp at two in the morning.
- 12 mm black wood frame Flat square profile, 22 mm deep, matte finish, plexiglass front, no mat.
- Three sizes 30x40 cm, 45x60 cm and 60x80 cm. The middle one sits well beside a chair.
What mothers ask before it goes up
1.What does Psalm 121 say about sleep?
2.Where should I hang a Psalm 121 print in my house?
3.Is this a good gift for a mother going through a hard season?
4.Will it look too religious to guests who do not share my faith?
There will be another two o'clock tonight
Choose the size for the wall beside the chair, framed in black wood or as a single sheet.
