Soror Mystica Wears a Red Dress in our Last Wild Place

Abstract

This exploratory research conceived as ceremony makes an effort to rupture dominant narratives oppressing our exploration and meaning making of the universal lived experience that is called death.  In modern society, hegemony, commodification of the sacred, and the medicalization of an otherwise organic human unfolding contribute to the perception of a false separation in our dying time.  In so doing, we deny our interdependence, encounter death as pathology, and hold our universal experience as a distant other.  Applying Meyer’s (2008) triangulation of meaning to the intersections exploring end of life relationships, mixed methodologies reveal how the Soror Mystica (the mystical sister) as alchemical metaphor of the midwife is engaged as the embodiment of an ethic of radical hospitality.  In so doing, potentials for healing and transformation may be liberated, emerging as decolonized dwelling Places of intersubjective mutuality, which provide an awareness of an uncolonized last wild Place.  A wild Place is ensouled by “the living present” (Abram, 1996, p. 201) and presents the feminine principle in mysterium coniunctionis with the phenomenal world.  An ecopsychological standpoint, this wild Place values relationality and welcomes the practice of StoryTending, in liberating death from the shadows while meeting our existential anxiety and offers the fresh eyes of loving curiosity.  Fresh eyes are open to the wonderment and awe of mystery, above all in this ultimate transformation.