Life unfolds more like a web than a straight line. Our participation in daily life, even our smallest, most routine actions, affect the people and places around us. We are participants as much as we are creators of life’s ever-expanding, interwoven story.
Altar Places helps people see, appreciate and honor their role in the ongoing creation of this web, specific to the way we encounter and engage in the places around us.
We encourage individuals and groups to seek active re-engagement with the places that no longer fortify them in order to recreate, reshape and re-story the energy and power the place holds.
Through the engagement of individuals, groups and communities, we can begin to connect with this energy, celebrate its potential, and reshape the present and the future of a place.
We believe all places, from the most metropolitan to the most rural, possess inherent, transformative powers.
Our goal: To help people engage, exchange, reshape, and make way for the new story of a place, wherever and whatever that place may be.
Our belief: Through active engagement with place, people provide a new palette where the place can retell its story, and create the foundation for the restructuring and reshaping of their own stories.
Read more>>>Moving from avoidance to enjoyment.
The energy of a place, whether positive, negative, or absent, can have a profound effect on individuals, groups and communities. In the 21st century mindscape, we are often encouraged to escape or flee our surroundings in order to find peace and rest. Altar Places inspires the opposite: re-build the bonds between people and their places in daily life. Sustainable community has ready access to power and sanctuary right where they live.
We understand that place can be a park that has been overrun by gang and drug activity; a road that has had its inherent spirit stripped due to crime, neglect, atrophy or atrocity; even a single tree that marks a spot where something painful or traumatic occurred.
Moving from avoidance to enjoyment involves a committed re-engagement with a place that re-aligns, re-links and rebuilds the bonds between the place and people.
While the process is unique to each place and set of circumstances, we rely on the following to guide our understanding and awareness of every place and situation:
- Acknowledgement: seeing, understanding and appreciating the story that currently exists.
- Envisioning: beginning to draw, tell and share the wished-for story of a place.
- Engagement: actively taking part in the re-storying/recreation of a place.
- Sharing: communicating the new story in a way that invites others to participate, and encourages them to reshape, recreate and re-story the places that matter to them.
