While It Was Yet Dark
John 20:1Living room
1. Select your Finish: Print only
170 gsm archival matte paper, ships rolled
Perfect for self-framing
2. Select your Size:
Fast shipping
Tracked to your door
30-day returns
Money-back guarantee
Secure payment
Encrypted checkout
A garden just before anyone arrives
From across the room it is mostly light. A hillside of terraces, the sun only just over the ridge, the grass still holding the cold of the night. Low on the path a stone sits off to one side, already moved. No lettering, no cross, nothing sharp anywhere in it.
What living with it gives you is small and steady: the first thing you look at each day is a place where morning came anyway, and the quiet lasts a little longer than it would have.
One person sees a garden just before anyone arrives, the day not started. Someone else looks straight at the stone and says somebody has already been here. A friend who does not know the chapter sees a hillside at dawn and asks about the light. New mercies every single morning, your mother says, and then everyone goes back to their coffee. It is the calmest thing on the wall, and it is the one guests ask about.
The light arrives before anyone does
I keep returning to the ridge. The light there is thin and new, not warm yet, and it comes down the terraces one row at a time, as if it were deciding where to go. The stone is off the path already. Nobody is standing near it. What I love is the emptiness of the garden at that minute, the moment just before the first footsteps come up the slope, when everything has happened and no one has been told yet.
My hope is a small one. That whoever hangs this has an hour that belongs to her, and that when she looks up from it the garden is still there, still early, still waiting with her, while the rest of the house sleeps a while longer.
Bought for herself, wrapped by someone else
One woman buys it for herself, in the season of early feedings and early alarms. She wanted a warm, soothing thing to look at while she fed the baby in the middle of the night, and then she wanted it where she reads and prays, not in the nursery.
The other is a husband writing it on a November list, or an adult daughter ordering in the weeks before Easter, for someone who says she truly does not want stuff, she has everything she needs. This one takes a single nail and gives back an hour.
It hangs at the right end of the sofa wall, beside the chair, at 45x60 cm, the right panel of a row of three.
What comes out of the tube or the box
- 170 gsm paper Matte uncoated as a print only, coated silk inside the frame. No shine under a lamp at six in the morning.
- Black wood frame, 12 mm A flat square profile 12 mm wide and 22 mm deep, matte, plexiglass front, no mat, the print running to the inner edge.
- Three sizes 12x16, 18x24 and 24x32 in / 30x40, 45x60 and 60x80 cm. 45x60 sits beside a chair, 60x80 holds a sofa wall on its own.
What people ask before it goes up
1.What verse is about the morning of the resurrection?
2.What two prints hang well above a bed?
3.What Christian art works in a neutral bedroom?
4.Is this a good gift for a new mother?
5.Where should it hang beside a reading chair?
By tomorrow the wall has already decided
Pick the size for the space beside your chair, and the garden is there at first light, before the house is.
