My mum’s gave us a beautiful wooden bowl on one visit. The bowl was designed beautifully with adinkra symbols. One of them was the “Gye Nyame” symbol.
The symbol means “No one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see it’s end, except God”, popularly translated “Except God.”
Anytime I looked at it, I thought of the gift of life. I saw the bowl as a crucible that held life, the soul, the spirit. Like the gift mum brought us, life is gifted to us too. When we are given this gift of life, it comes with a reminder – Gye Nyame. That we are supposed to take care of this gift and the dear Lord, being omnipresent, is there to help.
A few months after we got the bowl, it fell and got a crack right through the “Gye Nyame” symbol! We were devastated. As I starred at the cracked bowl, it made think of what happens when we did not take care of the gift – it broke. I thought, life is a gift just like the bowl and if we don’t take care of it, we break it. We destroy it.
As life gets destroyed, the reminder, “Gye Nyame” is not enough anymore. It is just another symbol.
I took a picture of the bowl with a 150-year-old lens and printed it with a 150+ year-old technique. Sort of saying some truths are ancient..