Category: Sharing News of Others

Recently we invited our advisory board members to tell us what is on their minds these days, to share their current projects, milestones, and emerging collaborations.  Donna’s report is the fifth in this series. 

Donna Read’s Life At The Moment. – May 15, 2021.  I turned 80 in 2018 and I found myself surprised I was still making movies and enjoying my work: I had imagined  by this time, I would be ‘retired’.  I was working with a group of architects and social designers who were interested in slum rehabilitation.  Their first selected project was a small slum in India about 400miles north of Mumbai.  The idea was to document the process, get to know the people involved and to follow up on their life after the project was built.  

In November, 2019, I was there for the last shoot we would do before the building was completed, when I fell and broke my hip.  

This was the beginning of a major change in my life and eventually opened the path to my retirement.  I got home to Montreal in time for my 81st birthday with three pins holding my hip together and an x-ray showing a growth in my bladder.  

I had the growth removed in March 2020, it was non-replicable cancer, and the day I left hospital, Montreal went into quarantine for the Covid-19 virus.  I had expected to get back to work, because after all, I work from home when I edit, but Covid changed everything including the situation in India, and my own priorities.  

Over the next few months, due to the virus and extreme monsoons building progress on our project in India virtually came to a stop.  There was a change in the office personnel, a filmmaker from India was hired, trips back to India were cancelled and I found myself wondering where I could fit into a project so far away in distance, culture and completion.

As the months unfolded,  I was concerned I could not contribute in the way my heart was telling me to.  I had felt part of a global story when I started the movie but with Covid I was feeling that vision had to include the political as I watched with horror what was unfolding in India, a departure from the original intention of our movie and something I knew I could not do from Canada.  More I felt my true purpose was to do the work from where I was, to tell stories I know and understood.      

In March 2021, I fell and broke my other hip and it put me where find myself now.  I have been in hospital for two months…surgery on my broken hip and a hip replacement on the hip I broke in India. Contemplating my future from a hospital room certainly put things into perspective. 

I am very aware of Time. And in truth, I no longer want to spend any more time making films as they are Times black hole. I am however drawn toward serving those who come into my orbit with a particular need; I am willing to advise and to serve those needs but  not to be responsible for the outcome. 

I have a big family 5 children, 5 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.  I want to spend time with them not the computer screen.  To satisfy my creative urges, I have hours of family videos and photos I want to put together.  And of course I have friends I want to visit, places I still want to see.  

I feel free at the moment, open to serving the life around me best I can.  I know that purpose will make itself known to me as I progress down the retirement path and I open myself to the mystery, like it always has.    

Recently we invited our advisory board members to tell us what is on their minds these days, to share their current projects, milestones, and emerging collaborations. Vicki’s report is the fourth in this series. 

The Covid isolation period has allowed sustained time for research and writing, which I have appreciated enormously. I’m excited about the Primordial Goddess collaborative book project I’m involved in with Miriam Robbins Dexter (see her blog for more details) and Laura Amazzone. We started this ambitious project more than ten years ago, mainly with the idea of meeting occasionally for fun and inspiration. Our decade of feminist scholarly synergy has produced an almost-finished manuscript investigating the roots of Goddess worship in India in the Bronze Age Indus Sarasvati Valley, comparing it with the development of civilization in Old Europe (the Danube Culture), and linking the two through millennia of cultural exchange and migration across Eurasia. For images, see the Home page of my website: vickinoble.com.

I am gestating a book that tells the story of Motherpeace Tarot, the project I co-created with Karen Vogel forty years ago in Berkeley, and which was licensed in 2017 by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman artistic director at Christian Dior, for a special line of clothing and accessories in one of their Cruisewear collections. Through this fateful collaboration, the matriarchal and Goddess imagery that Karen and I so lovingly embedded in our drawings of the late 1970s were taken to a whole new level by artisans and craftspersons at Dior, who turned them into elegant high fashion dresses, bags, shirts, and shoes worn by women in every cosmopolitan center in the world. I want to track the history (“herstory”) of women’s sacred imagery and textile production from nine thousand years ago through all the subsequent millennia until now, culminating in the extraordinary global feminist vision of Maria Grazia, who agreed with the premise in my 1991 book, Shakti Woman, that women (and female expression) belong at the center of culture and civilization.

I’ve also been making podcasts during the pandemic with two interesting hosts, Sean Marlon Newcombe and Dawn (“Sam”) Alden, who produce “Making Matriarchy Great Again.” They have done numerous interviews with me presenting my research on Gimbutas, Old Europe, and most recently, “The War Against the Goddess,” as well as shows featuring many other interesting guests.

Recently we invited our advisory board members to tell us what is on their minds these days, to share their current projects, milestones, and emerging collaborations.  Miriam’s report is the third in this series. 

I am devoting the greater part of my time to a book manuscript on the Indus/Sarasvati Valley, which I am co-authoring with Vicki Noble and Laura Amazzone.  We have been working on this manuscript for several years, and we are likely into our last year of work on it.  In the book, we discuss the fascinating high civilization of the Indus Valley, ca. 2600 BCE, as well as the related civilizations which precede it, and other ancient similar civilizations.

The ancient Indus civilization had plumbing, both for individual homes and for the community; beautiful jewelry and pottery; no evidence of weapons; sustainable agriculture; and no gender differentiation in their burials: equal grave goods for females and males.  They employed a writing system, albeit undeciphered, which included abstract symbols, evidence of a sophisticated script. Iconography from this ancient civilization has continued into early historic India as well as modern India and Nepal.  

This year, I am involved in several projects which honor the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, in this year, which would have been her centennial.  One of the projects is an ASWM-Institute of Archaeomythology virtual conference to be held this coming July.  Marija was my mentor at UCLA.  She was on my doctoral dissertation committee, and shortly after I finished my dissertation on Indo-European Female Figures, she invited me to present at her first international conference, in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and she was responsible for my first academic publication, “The Assimilation of Pre-Indo-European Figures into the Indo-European Pantheons,” in the Journal of Indo-European Studies. 

Another project which I am just beginning is to teach myself ancient Phoenician, in order to translate inscriptions involving the Goddess Tanit (Tannit, Tanith) and compare her to the Syrian Anat (with translations from the Ugaritic) and (with some diminution of function) Greek Athena.  The Semitic Tanit and Anat are related in both name and function (the final –t is an indication of feminine gender in Semitic languages). I believe that Athena – certainly not an Indo-European Goddess in origin, although assimilated into an Indo-European pantheon – is linguistically related as well.