~ June 2007 Supplemental Page~

Juice Bottle Bug Catcher
by Amanda Formaro

This craft is a great way to reuse a juice bottle while safely learning about the insects in our world. After your observations, be sure to return the critters where you found them! This project is rated EASY to do.  Ages: 6 and up.

What You Need

• Empty plastic juice bottle with at least one flat side and lid

• Scissors

• Craft foam

• Hot glue gun

• Scrap piece of window screen or tulle

• Natural items like rocks, grass, twigs etc.

What You Do

• Remove all labels from juice bottle. Wash inside and out thoroughly with warm water and mild dish soap. Rinse well and dry. Be sure to save the lid.

• Lay bottle on its flat side and use scissors to cut on opening on the side facing up.

• Cut a piece of screen or tulle to fit over the opening, overlapping it by about ¼” all the way around the edge.

• Cut a piece of craft foam about ½” bigger (all the way around) than the screen or tulle you just cut out. Cut center out of foam to create a “window.”

• Hot glue the screen to the craft foam.

• Hot glue the screen window to the opening on the bottle.

• Place rocks, pebbles, dirt, grass, twigs, or whatever other natural items you choose inside the bottle through the opening at the top.

• To catch bugs with your bottle, place the bottle on the ground in tall grass where the insects can climb in. Alternatively, you can catch insects on your own and place them into the bottle through the lid opening, then secure the lid.

• If you have trouble setting an insect free, or if you need to replace the greenery inside, you can easily peel back the screen cover. To replace, simply add more hot glue and secure in place again.

 Helpful Hints

• Do not leave the bottle in the sun, especially with insects inside. The plastic can get very hot and cause harm to your houseguests.

• This same project can be made in miniature form by using a small plastic juice bottle instead — perfect for class projects.

• If you’ve lost the lid but have a juice bottle, cover the opening with tulle or screen and secure with a rubber band.

For more fun activities go to www.kidsdomain.com.

Summer Solstice
by Pythia

Continued . . . How we think, feel, and feed our gestating babies is of prime importance at this time. Surround yourself with nature’s growing abundance, the sounds of birds, insects, and the neighborhood cats and dogs. If you’re lucky enough to have a cat or dog living with you, give them a talisman or a healing body rub.

This is the time to dream your psychic dreams in order to be shown the path you must follow at this time of the year. Dream pillows filled with mugwort, lavender or lemongrass can be slipped beneath your pillow slip so the odor will conjure a special dream. As you relax in bed before falling asleep, recite a verse similar to the following:

Mugwort cross the psychic sea.

Prophetic dreams now come to me.

Chant it over and over until you fall into the arms of Morpheus. It is a good idea to have a paper and pencil handy for jotting down those elusive, but useful dreams. May we all have the knowledge needed to understand and then weave those psychic dreams into our everyday existence.

Wiccans Keep the Faith With a Religion Under Wraps
by Neela Banerjee

Among the most popular religions to have flowered since the 1960s, Wicca—a form of paganism—still faces a struggle for acceptance, experts on the religion and Wiccans themselves said. In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.

But Wicca in the civilian world is largely a religion in hiding. Wiccans fear losing their friends and jobs if people find out about their faith.

“I would love to be able to say ‘Accept us for who we are,’ but I can’t, mainly because of my kids,” said the suburban mother, who agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity. “Children can be cruel, and their parents can be even more cruel, and I don’t want my kids picked on for the choice their mommy made.”

She worries that because most people know little about Wicca, they will assume she worships Satan. She fears that her family and friends will abandon her and that the community will ostracize her.

David Steinmetz, professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, said, “Wiccans have so many things stacked against them, from what the Bible says about the practice of magic to the history in this country of witch trials, that the image of them adds up to something so contrary to the consensus about genuine religion that still shapes American society.”

Wiccans worship the divine in nature. Some practice it privately in their homes, and others worship with large congregations. Most people do not grow up Wiccan but come to it from another religion.

“It’s a very open religion,” said Helen A. Berger, a sociology professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. “Each person can do what they want, and they don’t have to belong to a group. They take things from a number of different sources, like Eastern religions, Celtic practices. You are the ultimate authority of your own experience.”

But its symbols and practices elicit suspicion from outsiders, Wiccans and religion scholars say.

Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one’s destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism. (The five points of the star represent the elements of nature—earth, air, fire and water—and the spirit, within the eternal circle of life.)

It is unclear how many Wiccans and other pagans there are. The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey by the City University of New York found that Wicca was the country’s fastest-growing religion, with 134,000 adherents, compared with 8,000 in 1990. The actual number may be greater, Ms. Berger said. Some people may have been unwilling to identify themselves as pagan or Wiccan for the survey. Others combine paganism with other religions.

Wiccans face less backlash now than in the past. The Internet provides information about Wicca, and the popularity of the Harry Potter novels has made magic seem a force for good, scholars and Wiccans say.

David and Jeanet Ewing, coordinators of two pagan groups in the Washington area, estimate that at least 1,000 Wiccans and other pagans live in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. At least half actively hide their faith from their relatives, Ms. Ewing said. Many also hide their faith from their employers, Mr. Ewing said.

One such person is a 58-year-old former Roman Catholic who has been an auditor for 30 years in what he calls “one of the most buttoned-down departments in one of the most sacrosanct agencies” of the federal government.

“I put on this Joe Taxpayer suit, and it’s like living two lives,” he said. “A minority would have a problem with me, but it would be a big problem. They would assume we are doing weird things, illegal, immoral things, at all hours. They wouldn’t want to really know what we do, but they would go with their presuppositions instead.”

The auditor said that by “coming out of the broom closet,” he risked ostracism at work and perhaps being pushed into early retirement, which would affect his pension. “I don’t even want to contemplate it,” he said.

A New York marketing executive finds the city so secular that being passionate about religion is often met with a smirk, and it would be worse if people knew he was Wiccan, he said. “In my personal and private life, I like to be taken seriously,” he said. “Pagans are associated with the ’70s and hippies and counterculture. New York is a Type A city, and it’s all about getting ahead, and the kooky ones don’t get ahead.”

Members of other religions, including Jews and Catholics, have sometimes been forced to mask their faith in the past because of religious bias, Professor Steinmetz said. But it is rare, he added, for people to keep their religion from parents and grandparents, as many Wiccans do.

The Virginia mother has not told her mother or grandmother that she is a Wiccan. “I have a deep-seated fear that they will say, ‘I can’t be a part of this, you’re raising your kids as evil,’ ” she said.

She attends classes about Wicca on Friday nights, and she has yet to caution her older child, a preschooler, not to tell anyone about them.

“My son says, ‘Yeah, Mommy’s going to witch school,’ ” she said. “I’m just waiting for the day he says that in front of a teacher.”

Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun & Uzume, Goddess of Mirth and Dance

Continued . . . Uzume, a lesser goddess than Amaterasu, is remembered largely for the role that she played in bringing Amaterasu out of a severe depression. The goddess Uzume played an important role in leading Amaterasu back to her heavenly responsibilities, insuring the fertility of the crops.

The goddess Uzume, because of her part in the myths of Amaterasu, is also allied with the art of spiritual drumming. The story of the Japanese goddesses Amaterasu and Uzume will tell you why.

Amaterasu was the daughter of the supreme Japanese diety who, in Japanese mythology, had created the world. She and her brothers, the storm god, Susanowa, and the moon god, Tsuki-yomi, shared the power of governing the universe. Amaterasu, as the sun goddess, was responsible for illuminating the world and for insuring the fertility of the rice fields.

Amaterasu was also an accomplished weaver, with many attendants who joined her in weaving the stunning satins, silks, and brocades for which Japan is rightfully famous.
 

Her brutish brother Susanowa was very jealous of the beautiful Amaterasu's power and popularity. Going on a rampage, he slaughtered a young horse (an animal sacred to the goddess) and threw its bloody carcass into the weaving room, wrecking the looms, ruining the precious fabrics, and terrifying the hapless women who were working there.

In some versions of the myth, one of her attendants was killed in the violence . . . in another version, Amaterasu herself was wounded when her brother attacked her with a shuttle.

Amaterasu, depressed and grieving over this violation by her brother, crept away to a dark cave in the mountains and refused to return to the heavens.

Without her there was no sun, and the rice fields lay dying in the endless night, while the people grew hungry.

Hundreds of the gods and goddesses came to the entrance of her cave and begged for Amaterasu to come out. But her grief was so great that Amaterasu could not be moved by their pleas.

Finally, Uzume, the goddess of mirth, came up with a plan. The gods rolled a large bronze mirror in front of the entrance to the cave while Uzume began to dance on a large overturned tub. Her dance frenzied and ecstatic, her feet drumming on the tub, Uzume hoisted her kimono and the crowd roared and laughed with delight.

Amaterasu could hear the feverish laughter and drumming and became curious about its origin. Hoping to peek out of the cave's entrance, she was momentarily dazzled by her own reflection in the bronze mirror and was unable to see what was happening.

When she crept further out, the gods captured Amaterasu and sealed the entrance to the cave so that she could not return.

Her grief dissipated by the revelry and good humor she found around her, Amaterasu returned to her home and her light once more shone upon the earth.

In another myth, Amaterasu was angered by her other brother, the moon god Tsuki-yomi, because he killed a goddess he felt had insulted him. The sun goddess Amaterasu told her brother that she would never see him again . . . which, in Japanese mythology, explains why the sun and the moon appear at different times in the sky.

The goddesses Amaterasu and Uzume teach us about the healing power of laughter and dance, and remind us that we can often find healing and wisdom in humor.