Say you have a rock.

The Pros:
You can sit on it. Xena and Gabrielle often sit on rocks.

The Cons:
Then again, you could smash a rock into someone’s head. Xena and Gabby don’t do that. Unless they have to.

The Metaphysics:
Xena will use whatever she needs to defend Gabrielle, herself, and those in need. But she doesn’t (post-Borias, of course) initiate attacks just to display power or take what isn’t hers. She uses violence to protect.

When Xena’s daughter Eve turns into a flower child and sits cross-legged around the peace circle with her guru Eli and his innocents in The Way (Season 4), it is Xena and Gabrielle who circle the parameter, unseen by the worshippers, guarding them.

There are peaceful people, and there are people who must protect those peaceful people. We all need each other. It’s a circle of dependency.

(c)2006

Xena was created by John Schulian and Robert G. Tapert.

You know how the violin can bring tears to your eyes? The viola, played by Armine Abrahamyan, can make you seriously weep.

Armine’s compositions and her playing sing the story of the complexity of human emotion - and yet her fluid, flawless style makes us understand that our experiences, our emotions - our lives -  are all part of one, continuous story.

At this moment, Armine is considering offers of artistic representation and is courting the recording offers that are coming her way. She is on the brink of stardom. Young, talented, beautiful, and filled with creative magic, this instant - this brink - will not last long. Any moment from now, Dr. Armine Abrahamyan is about to become a star.

Copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. Do not copy any portion of this article without permission.

If Xena were alive today - which she was in The Xena Scrolls (Season 2), Deja Vu All Over Again (Season 4), and Send in the Clones (Season 6) - she would never wear fur.

She respects animals.

Look at Xena’s relationship with her horse Argo. They are soul-mates. They talk to each other psychically. Xena respects Argo’s need for freedom, and Argo respects Xena respecting him.

Argo loves Xena. Remember the time Xena is tied between Argo and another horse and the horses are supposed to go in different directions and pull her apart? Argo and the other horse have a conversation, make a plan, and help Xena escape.

In Animal Attraction (Season 5), Xena intuits a situation up ahead on the road. It turns out to be a horse with a hurt foot. Xena and Gabrielle are totally torn up about this. They bandage the mare’s leg, take her into town to a cozy stable, and Gabby nurses her back to health.

Xena does threaten to eat Gabby’s horse, but she doesn’t mean it: Xena is pregnant at the time and doesn’t know it yet. Given the choice between a horse and ice cream with pickles, I’m sure Xena would choose the ice cream. I mean her son Solan was being raised by centaurs.

Anyway. They do eat meat, but only because it was 2000 years ago. And even then there is squeamishness, as when Gabby has to kill a bunny. Gabby angsts-out over the bunny slaughter, and the subtext is that killing bunnies is bad.

As with people, Xena and Gabrielle don’t kill animals unless they’re down to a survival level.

In fact, in The Xena Scrolls, Deja Vu…, and Send in the Clones, I never did see Xena eat meat or wear fur.

Copyright (c) 2008.  All rights reserved.

Xena was created by John Schulian and Robert G. Tapert.

You’re watching a live performance of Celtic Woman’s, A New Journey, and your heart is already in your throat. It’s trying to leap out of your mouth and dance with the angelic sopranos from Ireland. Suddenly, your heart simply stops - Máiréad has landed.

The breathtaking sight lasts only a moment. Máiréad does not stand still. Before you’re able to take in your next breath, she is off, floating around the stage and playing her fiddle, with her luminous golden hair flowing behind her. She may be barefoot, she may be dancing in 4-inch sandals. And as she plays her fiddle, her smile warms not only the musicians around her, but also the audience all the way to the top mezzanine’s back row.

"Sing a new song to the world!

Let your voice be heard, go and bring the word!

This whole world was meant to be, for you as well as me…

For humanity…" *

Actually, you may have seen her in other venues. She played her fiddle in three world tours of Lord of the Dance, Feet of Flames, and had toured with the Afro-Celt Sound System. She played on the original soundtrack of Riverdance, and has her own band as well.

• Máiréad’s first professional gig was with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in 1991.
• She won Irish Music Magazine’s Best Traditional Female player in 2003.
• She made a secret visit to Dublin in 2004 to play privately for HRH Princess Anne.
• 2004 was also the year she first played for Celtic Woman. This was at the Helix Theatre in Dublin. She’s been with Celtic Woman ever since - but somehow her energy level is so high she manages to play with other groups and shows.
• Her first solo album is called "Raining Up," in which she displays her wide range of playing styles and composing techniques.
• On her website, Máiréad says of her performances, "I like things to be very exciting and fiery but I like it to be … controlled as well. … It could be spontaneous but it has to be delivered in a certain way, to make it sound easy to other people."

According to the 6 seasons of Xena, death is basically moving from one place to another. Granted, there is a lot of trauma involved, especially if you’re going to be nailed to a cross.

I’m trying to think – did anyone ever really "die"? Ever? Because everytime we have an episode where Xena goes into the Afterlife for something, there they all are again. Living, breathing, dead people.

Xena is tight with Hades. In Death in Chains (Season 1), Hades asks her to do him a favor. She does. You network where you find yourself.

The soul, according to this Warrior Princess, lives on, irrespective of what the body does. The bad part about death is that in the Xena series, it usually hurts. Arrows, swords, neck-pinching, bashing with sticks. Pain is bad. But once they cross over, the pain is gone.

And the other reason death is bad is that the people who love you and can’t see your body anymore, become grief-stricken.

I suppose a few entities go far far away, like Mephistopheles, whom Xena defeats in The Haunting of Amphipolis (Season 6 ). But most Cross-Overs simply go somewhere else and continue doing their stuff.

Xena is even able to visit her son Solan, who lives, though dead, in a beautiful green garden with blue skies and friendly children to play with.

Remember when some of the Amazons get trapped in that foggy craggy place after they die? It’s in Season 4’s Adventures in the Sin Trade 2. Unhappy as they are with standing on rocks, no doubt bored out of their minds, they are fully conscious, equipped with outfits, bows and arrows, and great hair.

The most wonderful episodes involve the Japanese after-life all-girl boarding house for dead people (A Friend in Need I, Season 6). (Ooo, and the animation is awesome.) Their house is gorgeous, their garden is delightful, and their every need is met. Of course there is the evil Lord of the Dark Land, who comes blowing in when one of the pretty dead ladies rings an ankle bell. That’s why Xena has to go there: to save the ladies from this bully. And she does.

In the last episode, A Friend in Need II, even though Xena technically dies, meaning her body no longer functions and I guess they cut off her head - she is as alive as she’s ever been. Still a Warrior Princess. Still wearing her leather skirt and you-go-girl breastplates. Still saving people. The only difference is, Gabrielle throws the ashes of her physical body into the water.

Xena doesn’t have a body. I guess the response would be: So?

I sure hope that’s what death is like (minus any transitional physical pain). And I want to go painlessly, unlike my Warrior friend. As Blood Sweat & Tears sing, "Just let me go naturally." *

But if you believe Xena, and I do, I do – then the soul is an entity that journeys and learns. Sometimes it comes into a body, and the body can do stuff for it. Other times it does its things bodiless.

But even "in body" (like, "in country"?), the soul can go where it wants. It can enter other bodies. Once Xena and Callisto change bodies (Intimate Strangers and Ten Little Warlords, Season 2). In fact, Callisto has to be brought back from Hades for that physical "costume" change. Didn’t Melanie Beattie write a self-help book about not doing that?

In Little Problems (Season 5) Xena enters the body of a sick little girl.

And who can forget that crucifixion scene in Fallen Angel (Season 5) when they are dead, and a moment goes by, and Gabrielle wakes up. She flies over to Xena and wakes her up. Their bodies are hanging on the crosses, but the two women, alive as they ever were, fly off to heaven. They smile.

Bodies are awesome, I love bodies. But Xena has taught me that it’s the soul that does the real work; the eternal work.

© copyright 2008.

If I really want to know what’s going on, I turn to Joan Didion. Reading her essays and novels is like standing by the sea in late spring, inhaling a yoga-style whole-body breath and filling myself with fresh, sun-blessed, early evening air. Her writing is pure. It cuts through fog. It accepts paradoxes without blinking.  

I would call Joan Didion a genius. Her writing, some might say, is sparse. She doesn’t go into long descriptions. In her novels and essays, she shows us the bones. And yet somehow - and this is the genius part - the reader comes away knowing the bones, the flesh, the colors, the details, and a vivid picture of the whole story.

        Barbra Streisand & Kris Kristofferson
        in a movie photo from A Star is Born.
                Buy at AllPosters.com

Her latest book, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006), might be a good place for the Didion-newcomer to start. It contains seven of her non-fiction books that were published between 1968 and 2003. In John Leonard’s introduction, he says, "I have been trying forever to figure out why [her] sentences are better than mine or yours … They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice pick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx.”

My soul lives in this small, incense-filled Vedanta prayer room. In the center of Manhattan, this room is hushed; washed in a deep, velvety red except for some amber somewhere. It was lush with depth, like being inside a cushioned chamber. Even fifty years later, I am comforted by the sanctity of having been enclosed and protected in that room.

It was my grandmother, Ruthie, who took me and my sister there from time to time. I don’t remember how, but me and E. would sometimes find ourselves with Ruthie, in a hotel room in Manhattan, for the weekend.

I loved the City. One time Ruthie said she was going out to buy apples, and while she was gone I sat by the window ledge and watched with amazement as the cars, cabs, and city buses below filled me with peace. It was perhaps the first time in my life I had felt peace. To this day, the sound of traffic, and especially buses stopping and starting, is my background music for meditation.

Anyway, a few minutes later this magical grandmother was back in our hotel room, with God’s most delicious apples, which we all savored. New York City, I knew then, was the best place in the world to get fresh apples. Ruthie made the city magical.

The Vedanta temple - yes, she took us often. Although it didn’t look like a holy building from the outside, the minute we stepped in, inhaled the sandalwood, and felt the peace in the hearts of the others that were there, we were in a different world. Transformed.

Ruthie knew the Swami personally. Once she introduced me and E. to him after the session was over, and after that we always said hi to him whenever we went. I was awed because he remembered me and E. from one time to the next. He smiled at us and called us by name. It made me feel special. One of the few times in my life I felt special just because I was alive, not because I said or did anything. And oh he just adored Ruthie.

What a Gift.

The last time I saw Ruthie, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her house on the coast of Maine. She was 104. She looked deeply into my troubled eyes and I felt such love. I knew then that she had loved me her entire life.

At the time I thought I had chronic fatigue syndrome, and I was constantly filled with despair. Her gaze penetrated all of that and we looked into each others’ souls. I kissed her goodbye, and my sister drove me back to our motel. I knew I’d never see her again. She knew it too.

In her will, she asked that people send donations to an arts foundation in Pemaquid, Maine, that she had been a part of.

As a child, I didn’t understand her. I was a shy, desperate child of the suburbs, and when she came to visit I was mystified by her long disappearances - walks that she would take alone, that would last for hours. She walked every day. She always met people on her walks and got to know them, and she’d keep these people as friends, some for life.

She painted. As a child I had no idea what talent was. As an adult now, I understand that she was an extraordinary talent, an exquisite creator of oil paintings and water colors.

A Sudden Sense of Self

Shortly after her death, I was in my usual state of hopeless mental disrepair, and living alone in a condo in Texas. A package arrived from my cousin - it was a large box of some of Ruthie’s belongings.

As I went through the box, each item gave me more information about Ruthie. Her costume jewelry, rare books, and iconoclastic knick-knacks were alive with her energy. Picture books from the turn of the century that she had read aloud to my mother and that my mother read aloud to me… mementos, scarves Ruthie wore, a pack of little cards with pictures of flowers on them, a travel toothbrush kit from 1920. A scarf pin with her name engraved on it. A tiny wooden box with a carved dog inside.

And then I took from the box something that would change me forever - a silk, bohemian/Asian-style bathrobe that Ruthie had worn throughout her life. Gossamer, with peach and blue swirls.

As I took this fairy-winged fabric from the box, I knew who I was. I was Ruthie’s granddaughter. I was a genuine, real person; my needs, desires, skills, beliefs, and yearnings were real. I was authentic. I was the granddaughter of an artist, a woman ahead of her time, a left-bank beauty in a French beret, a Greenwich Village intellectual.

Ruthie was the daughter of "WZ." W.Z. was, if my family mythology is correct, an esteemed professor at Harvard or perhaps it was Princeton. In economics, or perhaps it was physics. His wife, Ida, was a licensed physician. I don’t know if she saw patients, because she was a woman and it was in non-woman times - but she modeled feminine independence and free-will. I never knew Ida, but Ruthie modeled it too.

Ruthie was an artist. She liked people, and she had hundreds of friends, including the Swami. She was outgoing and quirky. I don’t know that my mother’s experience with Ruthie was as positive, but Ruthie was there for her when she was in trouble as an adult with an abusive husband. Ruthie truly cared. She loved my mother so very much.

I didn’t know Ruthie well. She would appear and disappear in my life in non-linear intervals. But I love her, and I’m so grateful to have been her granddaughter. Perhaps I’ll see her on the other side, and I can tell her how grateful I am.

© copyright 2008. All rights reserved. Please write to Suzann for permission if you want to copy any or part of this blog. Thank you.

Xena’s Transformations

One of the main themes of the Xena series is transformation. Change - personal and cultural - arcs each of the six seasons, and transcends the plotline. Nothing stays the same. The ending is a beginning. The road never has a stopping point.

Even in death, Xena is on a mission.

Hard as it is to re-live, let’s look at The Debt, Part 1 (Season 3): the scene in China where Xena is dragged in a cage to the forest, and then thrown out there to be hunted and killed. She was the early, "evil" Xena at the time, and it was told in flashback. She was a mess.

One could say, yeah, that would be a "bottom." Because at that point it was either die or be saved by some intervening force.

And then Lao Ma appears. She’s like an angel. Beautiful, compassionate, psychic, able to see the future Xena as a force for good in the world. Lao Ma is royalty, but she still must hide Xena in her chambers to protect her. During that time, she cleans Xena up physically, and starts the long task of emotional clean-up. Xena slowly begins to understand that there is a different way to live.

I love the scene where Xena must hide underwater in Lao Ma’s courtyard pool, while Lao Ma is interrogated for freaking-EVER by the evil emperor Ming Tzu, who never does see Xena in the pool. At one point Lao Ma bends over the water as if to refresh her face, and breathes a lungful of air into Xena. Lao Ma knows that Xena’s barbarian energy can be turned around and channeled into acts of goodness. She literally breathes life into the Warrior Princess.

Do you need a Lao Ma to breathe new life into you when you’ve hit bottom? Perhaps when you’re as deep into your thing as Xena was into her barbarianism, then yes. But it’s not always a requirement.

And, too, you can often choose your bottom, rather than waiting to hit it. As a friend said, "You can get off the elevator at whatever floor you push the button for."

So here is a possible change chronology:

• The awareness that something is not working right. (Xena’s being chased by dogs and rageful people.)

• The desire to have it be another way. (She doesn’t want to die.)

• The decision to make it be another way. (She runs.)

• The passion to want the other way. (She runs a lot.)

• The creativeness and courage to try another way. (She takes a huge leap of faith when she decides to trust Lao Ma.)

• Working the new thing in small, tiny, minuscule, nano-infant baby steps (prevents overwhelm and giving up). (Lao Ma first cleaned Xena up, gave her pretty clothes, nourishing food. Then slowly added in the ideas about fairness and compassion.)

• Keeping the destination in clear focus throughout the process. (It was as if Xena were in school 24/7.)

Gabrielle’s Transformations

Gabrielle goes through the opposite change in The Deliverer (Season 3). From "blood innocent" - meaning she had never killed - to simply innocent - meaning she will kill but only to survive or protect.

Her inciting incident is saving the life of Khrafstar, who she does not know is the servent of the evil force, Dahak. In protecting Khrafstar, she kills his would-be murderer. Then she drops her knife and screams, knowing she will never be the same.

Whether or not we have a "bottom" (Gabby killing someone) or an interventionist (Lao Ma), most of us need an inciting life incident to cause us to react with change. Some have internal "aha"s. Others have visions, epiphanies, powerful dreams, episodes of depression, addiction, a near-death experience, an illuminating journal entry. Any of these can be used as springboards for the process of transformation.

OR: and yes, it’s possible - a decision. A simple, private, personal decision. Why not?

(c)copyright 2006. All rights reserved.

Recommended reading:
The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth by Gerald G. May;

Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung

Related Link:



Edgar Cayce’s site

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act II, Scene 2)

Xena was created by John Schulian and Robert G. Tapert.