This virtue honors the sacred spaces that serve as bridges between the physical and spiritual realms. Whether created from stone, cloth, wood, or breath, altars are portals of communication with divine intelligence; our higher selves, ancestral guides, deities, and nature spirits. Just like a mobile phone connects us to distant voices, altars allow us to commune with unseen realms. Most importantly, our own bodies are living altars; vessels through which Source energy speaks and moves.

When this reverence is lost, the sacred is reduced to superstition or destroyed altogether. The colonial theft and desecration of indigenous altars and artifacts severed generations from their spiritual technologies, creating disconnection, cultural disorientation, and spiritual amnesia. Without these portals of communion, communities suffer the loss of their spiritual rhythm and guidance, leading to disorder and a fractured sense of self.

In this piece, a figure lights candles at an ancestral altar surrounded by meaningful symbols; fire, earth, memory, and offering. A plant, an Ashanti fertility doll, fruit, and a photograph of an ancestor come together to reflect the diversity of form altars can take. The scene is a call to remember: wherever intention meets reverence, an altar is born; and to honor them is to remain in conscious relationship with the divine.