(TheOnion.com)
A lack of democracy in the United Farm Workers gave Chavez immunity
Posted in Politics and Movements: US
Frank Bardacke’s history of the Farm Workers union opened many eyes to the reasons the UFW became a shadow of its former self.
by Jane Slaughter April 13, 2026 (therealnews.com)
9/8/1985-Delano, California- United Farm Workers president Cesar Chavez declares war on pesticides at a rally marking the 20th anniversary of the Delano grape strike and the founding of the UFW. Photo via Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on April 6, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
In 2011 Frank Bardacke published an 800-page history of the Farm Workers union: Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. It opened many eyes to the reasons the UFW became a shadow of its former self.
Bardacke starts the book with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “O what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down…”
Bardacke was a farmworker in the fields of the Salinas Valley for six seasons in the 1970s. When he decided to write his book years later, he went back to his carpool co-workers, finding them still at work in the fields. In 1994, the union had been thoroughly defeated for nearly 10 years—but his old friends were afraid even to mention its name where the foreman might hear.
I interviewed Frank Bardacke after a New York Times investigation revealed evidence that Chavez had sexually abused young girls who were volunteering with the union, and the allegation that he had also assaulted union co-founder Dolores Huerta. –Jane Slaughter
Jane Slaughter: The revelations about Cesar Chavez as a sexual predator: many people have said they were “surprised but not shocked” or “shocked but not surprised.” How did you react?
Frank Bardacke: The abuse of Ana Murguia was rumored at the time among UFW staff, primarily at the La Paz headquarters. Many of the rumors originated with Ana’s stepmother, Kathy Murguia. But people just didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to look into it very deeply because Cesar was one of these powerful men who could do anything he damn well pleased; he was immune from investigation.
It puts him in the category that seems to be so prevalent these days, or at least more known about: powerful men who can do whatever they want to do, including groom children and abuse women, and they don’t have to answer for it.
Where did that power come from?
For the men we know about, it comes from money or political connections or celebrity. Where did Cesar’s power come from?
The first answer is that he had just turned a losing 1965 grape strike into the most successful boycott in American history, at the conclusion of which, in 1970, farmworkers won the most substantial contracts they’d ever had: a hiring hall, grievance procedures, seniority lists. They’d never had those before.
That’s the first reason he had power. Through that he became a celebrity. He was the organizer, the architect, and the main energy behind that boycott, a hero and a celebrity with the kind of immunity that modern celebrities have.
But the second reason was an internal reason within the UFW. Everybody within the organization owed their job to Cesar. He appointed everybody, he could discharge anybody at his will, which he often did. That wasn’t just theoretical power; periodic purges pulsed through the organization. So you didn’t disagree with Cesar except at the peril of losing your job.
Those were the two reasons that no one wanted to follow up on the rumors of abuse. He was an authentic hero who had led and directed that boycott, and everybody in his organization owed their job to him.
Tell us more about the structure of the UFW.
That’s a crucial part of this. From the beginning, say in the early 1960s, the structure was basically volunteer organizers appointed by Chavez who earned $5 a week, plus expenses if on some kind of assignment.
That structure lasted even when the UFW Organizing Committee (UFWOC) became an actual union. They continued this organizational structure of volunteers. They did not set up union locals. The union constitution did not have provision for union locals. There was no way that an ordinary farmworker could elect anybody; everybody served at Chavez’s pleasure. That included the field offices in local places where there were farmworker contracts.
Then in 1970 there was a victorious farmworker strike in the Salinas Valley. There was a provision in the agreement that allowed for farmworkers to elect their own reps, called field reps, who would help enforce the contract in the local areas.
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Field reps were in place in addition to the field offices, where everyone owed their jobs to Chavez. But the paid reps owed their jobs to their crews. They got the pay equivalent to what their former crews were making. They were highly skilled, high-paid crews, earning as much as $500 a week back in the day.
This was an entirely new situation in the UFW and Chavez had tremendous trouble from the outset with the field reps—who could disagree with him. People hadn’t successfully disagreed with Chavez for nearly 15 years. There was no tradition of arguing and debating and voting as in other unions.
The paid reps became quite independent and collectively they decided that the big problem in Salinas was that they only had half of the valley organized, and for the union to survive, they had to organize the nonunion companies.
So they started organizing the nonunion companies and had some success. But Chavez was never comfortable with the Salinas contracts. There were lots of contract disputes and Chavez had never dealt with contract disputes. He was sick of the complaints, he thought contracts were a pain in the ass. He was busy with the boycott, which he thought was the most important tool the union had.
But what was the boycott for if not to win more contracts?
The reality of contracts was different from the idea of getting more contracts. Contracts brought problems, especially in 1970 in Salinas after a victorious strike. The workers were testing the extent of their victory. They were filing grievances and fighting for seniority rights.
It was the year I went into the fields and I was astounded by the militancy. I was on a crew that was told to thin the lettuce, and people wouldn’t leave the bus because they said the fields had been fumigated too recently—this was a right which was in the contract. The foreman was furious. He ordered us to go into the fields and somebody went to the union office and somebody came out and argued with the boss and we never went to work that day.
Chavez was primarily a boycott leader by this time. He was not really interested in rank-and-file problems on the ground. Moreover, he could see the reps were expanding their constituency and he thought they would become even more powerful. He ordered them to stop organizing, and when they didn’t, he fired them. Even though he didn’t have a legal right to do so.
There was a big battle and it all came out at the UFW convention—and the growers knew about it. They knew the union was divided, and in 1980 they went on the offensive and basically defeated the union. This story in all its gory details can be found in my book.
Is there a lesson here for unionists about how their unions should be run?
Yes. Democratic unionism is essential to union strength. Open discussion and debate is essential to building the kind of unity that you need. The lack of democratic organization is what caused the downfall of the UFW. The lack of democratic organization not only gave Chavez immunity in his abuse of girls and women, but is also what caused the downfall of the UFW.
Is there a lesson about making it all about one leader?
I’m not against leaders. Good leaders are essential to a movement. The main lesson I see is that the good leader has got to emerge out of a democratic tradition and democratic discussion and shouldn’t serve for life.
What about the rumors that the union was opposed to undocumented workers?
That is another long, sad story. At various periods the union was actively opposed to the undocumented. They even set up their own border patrol line in the Imperial Valley, called the “wet line.” The UFW had an anti-illegals campaign in the early ’70s in which they actually fingered undocumented people to the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] . UFW loyalists would provide a list to the local INS office of the undocumented people working in the fields.
These were their co-workers.
Yes. Close to half the workers in the fields were undocumented by this time. Why would an organization that was trying to organize field workers set one half of field workers against the other half?
Chavez’s answer was, “We have to explain to the boycotters why we are losing contracts. Illegals is the answer. The undocumented are taking the contracts away from us.” Which points to the fact that the best way to understand Chavez in the mid-1970s was as a boycott leader, not a farmworker leader. He sacrificed the organizing of farmworkers to strengthen his boycott organizing.
What now?
I’m for taking down the statues and renaming the schools and the streets. I’m not for replacing them with the name of Dolores Huerta, who was a loyal lieutenant and very often the point person in the various purges of people who had elicited Chavez’s displeasure.
If you want to give them a name of a farmworker, give them the name of one of the reps who are still known in the fields. Cleofas Guzman. Mario Bustamante.
Jane Slaughter
Jane Slaughter is a former editor of Labor Notes and co-author of Secrets of a Successful Organizer.More by Jane Slaughter
Companies Just Learned a Brutal Lesson About Training AI to Do Human Jobs
The seedy underbelly of the AI industry is really starting to show.
Published Apr 15, 2026 (Futurism.com)
A dismal job market has given rise to a grim new cottage industry: a buzzy San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor is hiring desperate job-seekers to train AI models to do the work they can’t get hired for anymore.
The company has been recruiting educated and underemployed experts while keeping them fully in the dark about whose AI they’re even training. As New York Magazine reported last month, shifts are also crushingly long, the vast majority of managers are young and inexperienced, and contracts often end abruptly without any prior warning.
Now, companies that hired Mercor — which include OpenAI and Anthropic, according to NYMag‘s reporting — have learned a rude lesson: Mercor revealed late last month that it had been hacked, again shedding light on Silicon Valley’s extremely fragile and contractor-dependent AI supply chain.
The startup told TechCrunch that it was affected by an exploit linked to an open source project called LiteLLM. A sample of data allegedly stolen from Mercor reviewed by the publication included material referencing Slack data and videos purportedly showing conversations between Mercor’s AI systems and its hired workers — meaning that the theft very likely exposed sensitive information from the companies that hired Mercor to train their AI systems.
“We are conducting a thorough investigation supported by leading third-party forensics experts,” a Mercor spokesperson told TC. “We will continue to communicate with our customers and contractors directly as appropriate and devote the resources necessary to resolving the matter as soon as possible.”
The situation is looking bleak. Contractors have since filed five lawsuits against the startup, as Business Insider reported last week, accusing it of violating data privacy and consumer protection laws. The suits allege Mercor could’ve leaked highly sensitive data, including Social Security numbers or addresses, to bad actors.
While it’s not uncommon for companies to be sued following major data leaks, the latest development once again highlights the dangers of relying on an army of underpaid and overworked contractors to train extremely valuable AI models.
Mercor’s corporate clients are clearly nervous as well. Meta has officially pausing all work with Mercor during its own investigation into the security incident, as Wired reported earlier this month.
However, it’s likely not for any concerns over the wellbeing of the gig workers who are being exploited. The biggest worry for companies like Meta or Mercor is losing their competitive edge by exposing the ways they train their AI models to other AI labs.
It’s far from the first time Mercor has fallen foul with the extensive line of highly educated workers it relies on. Even before the latest hack, Mercor was hit with three class-action lawsuits over the past seven months, per NYMag, with plaintiffs accusing it of relying on independent contractors, who have little to no agency at the company, let alone insight into the work they do.
In November, contractors also accused the startup of firing them, only to be offered work on a different project — but at a much lower hourly rate.
More on Mercor: AI Companies Are Treating Their Workers Like Human Garbage, Which May Be a Sign of Things to Come for the Rest of Us
Victor Tangermann
Senior Editor
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
How to Trust Your Inner Knowing with Emmy Vadnais
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 15, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist and integrative medicine practitioner based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com/ In this video, rebooted from 2020, she describes how the practice of energy medicine helped her through a serious crisis, overcoming both personal and professional obstacles. She acknowledges that it can be very hard for individuals to trust their own inner guidance when they are under stress and in pain. She offers a number of practical, long and short term strategies for viewers who may be in the throes of similar dilemmas. An awareness of subtle energies enables us to realize that we are much larger beings than we normally take ourselves to be. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 9, 2020)
Looksmaxxing: Inside the dangerous trend taking over the feeds of young men
60 Minutes Australia Apr 12, 2026 Impressionable young men under the spell of a dangerous phenomenon called looksmaxxing.
Blackface: A Shameful History as American as Apple Pie
A new book by Rhae Lynn Barnes examines how minstrelsy once occupied the center of the nation’s cultural life.
Published March 23, 2026 Updated April 1, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
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DARKOLOGY: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, by Rhae Lynn Barnes
When it comes to tracking down material related to amateur minstrel shows in America, the historian Rhae Lynn Barnes writes, you can often smell the evidence before you see it.
Barnes, who teaches at Princeton, has spent two decades rummaging in closets, basements, schools, churches, attics and estate sales — under the eaves of the American psyche — for the remnants of this egregious ephemera. It’s all evidence of a practice once so beloved that until the 1970s, rowdy, high-stepping, “comic” blackface shows were seen by most white citizens to be as American, as harmless and as appetizing as apple pie.
Darkology
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Libraries and archives were rarely helpful to Barnes: So much of this evidence (programs, photographs, songbooks, cans of burnt-cork makeup) has been lost, either concealed or purged. When Barnes was close, though, the smells of blackface theater — “cigarettes, liquor, greasepaint, aftershave, hair spray” — would charge the air.
Most Americans over a certain age, those who were paying attention, know this material is out there. Maybe you are old enough to remember newspaper ads for amateur blackface performances, which were held well into the second half of the 20th century. Maybe you glimpsed a souvenir matchbook. Maybe your great-uncle was in an Elks Lodge minstrel show.
Maybe you’ve read books about minstrelsy, like Eric Lott’s influential “Love and Theft” (Bob Dylan borrowed Lott’s title for his 2001 album), or journalism on the subject. But with her meticulous, cleareyed and pulverizing new volume, “Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment,” Barnes is here to say that we do not know the half of it. She has scraped together everything that’s known and plastered new receipt after new receipt after new receipt to the walls of the historical record.
Because professional minstrelsy declined after the Civil War, Barnes writes, scholars mistakenly came to believe that it was in retreat across the culture. Instead, it went underground: Amateur shows more than picked up the slack. What seemed to be over was just beginning.
Nearly everyone who wasn’t the butt of the joke was in on it. “This is not a tale of fragmented, strange, isolated events, the work of backwoods fanatics or marginalized racists whose blacked-up faces leer from grainy yearbook photos,” she writes. “Amateur minstrelsy was no sideshow. It was at the dark and ever-present center of modern American life.”
The author is often at her best when detailing what blackface performances left in their shadow. They were crucial in perpetuating the stereotypes of Black people as lazy, criminal, lewd and illiterate. They generated “the cultural capital needed to justify racial inequality.” This was a white problem labeled the Black problem.
Barnes is an American aquarium drinker, with a nose for the dregs at the bottom of the tank. You can open up “Darkology” almost anywhere and find the squirming details. Emily Dickinson collected blackface sheet music; Elvis Presley, before his Sun recordings, played his music at a minstrel show in Memphis organized by his homeroom teacher; Doris Day, Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, Bob Newhart, Lou Gehrig and Frank Sinatra “blacked up” (as did a number of Black stars); Babe Ruth and presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, were fans of the shows.
The annual Gridiron dinners in Washington — the precursors to the White House Correspondents Dinner — regularly featured minstrel performances. John Lennon learned to play music on a banjo owned by his grandfather, who’d used it in minstrel shows. Looney Tunes sprang from minstrelsy’s DNA.
These things, some of them known, if not at the level of detail Barnes provides, are the tip of this book’s iceberg. In the years after World War II, she writes, “blackface was the national zeitgeist.” Her tone is rarely scolding. She does not advertise her moral purity. She is here to dispassionately collect the forensic evidence.
This book takes extended aim at the Elks, a social club founded by professional minstrel performers. The organization amassed political power (Supreme Court justices, military generals and presidents were members) and “normalized blackface as a charitable, positive, civic duty and intergenerational family tradition.”
If you grew up in a small town that had a seemingly innocuous welcome sign with fraternal emblems on it, this indicated, through the 1970s, the likelihood that one could see a minstrel show. To Black people and other minorities, the message was: Keep out.
Barnes investigates the publishers who issued blackface plays and guidebooks, for use in classrooms and churches, with advice on how to tailor the material for local audiences. One of the largest, T.S. Denison & Company, mailed 350,000 catalogs to customers in 1947. Three years later, in 1950, it shipped 5,000 minstrel wigs.
The author laments the paucity of hard information about these publishers. She wonders what their whites-only editorial meetings were like. “Did they discuss character names in plays for schoolchildren like ‘Hannah Rentfree,’ ‘Alabama Screwluce: A Chicken Raiser,’ or the blunt ‘Useless’?” One of Denison’s plays instructed performers to punctuate their lines with exaggerated blinks and to open their mouths very widely at the start of important sentences.
Barnes documents in scarifying detail how, under the progressive New Deal, including the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theater Project, this material was both financed and distributed by the U.S. government. During World War II, kits were sent to soldiers to put on their own minstrel shows. Among the contents: burnt cork, wigs, tambourines, makeup advice, Stephen Foster sheet music and “tips for safely using spotlights without attracting enemy fire.”
There is a long, complicated section about how popular minstrelsy was among the Japanese Americans who were forced into detention centers during World War II. Another long section details Franklin D. Roosevelt’s obsession with blackface. On the day he died, in Warm Springs, Ga., he was scheduled to attend a minstrel show he’d commissioned and helped write. The show went on: White polio patients in blackface were among the performers.
Barnes also focuses on Gerald Ford’s long association with minstrelsy, information that his nearly 500-page autobiography does not mention.
The University of Vermont, and the town of Burlington, is placed under the microscope over the school’s popular and long-running Kake Walks. These lasted until 1969, and racist ice sculptures filled the town. Barnes profiles a Black student who was instrumental in bringing them to an end. She was almost injured in a riot that erupted.
Some long books you must feel your way into. Others smack you awake from their first pages. “Darkology” is among the latter. It opens with a 33-page introduction that is so vivid and shot through with annihilating detail that you wonder if she has anywhere left to go. She does. This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.
If Barnes’s book has a fault, it’s an occasional lack of nuance, not in the unambiguously insidious use of blackface but around the subject of popular music and the slippery push and pull, and attraction and repulsion, inherent in what we now often generalize as cultural appropriation. A small section that’s critical of the Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty, for his early embrace of Foster’s minstrel music and for his faux-Southerness, for example, reads as if she has never listened to him.
“Darkology” is a major and thrilling work of American history. It deals out uncomfortable truth after uncomfortable truth. James Baldwin understood its subject implicitly. “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, 7,” he said, “to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance … has not pledged allegiance to you.”
DARKOLOGY: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment | By Rhae Lynn Barnes | Liveright | 501 pp. | $39.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2026, Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Dark Days in America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Free Will Astrology: Week of April 16, 2026
by Rob Brezsny | April 14, 2026 (NewCity.com)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Anthropologist and author Clifford Geertz loved to use “thick description.” He wrote detailed reports that captured not just the surface level of what happened but the deeper levels of meaning. Here’s an example of thin description: “He winked.” Thick description: “He quickly closed and opened his right eyelid in a culturally specific gesture of playfully conspiratorial communication.” In the coming weeks, Aries, I invite you to enjoy the sumptuous pleasures of thick description. Unleash your wild curiosity as you dig down into the rich, complex truths about everything. Gleefully explore how the cultural, personal and historical contexts give each moment its specific, nuanced significance. (PS: This approach will enhance your options for responding.)
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): New beginnings and final chapters will be overlapping in the coming weeks, and they’ll push you in the direction of robust growth. It won’t always be obvious which is which, though, so you’ll need to sharpen your discernment to read the signs. Here are two contemplations to steer you: 1. Which long-running sagas in your life have finally played themselves out? 2. Which struggling, half-forgotten dreams are yearning to rise again and blossom as if they were brand new? Once you’ve listened deeply enough to answer those questions, move boldly: Feed and protect whatever is being born, and actively assist in the graceful dismantling of whatever is ready to end.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): One of your go-to tools or assets is still functioning, but now is exactly the time to repair or refurbish it—before it breaks. Furthermore: A power outage of sorts may be looming unless you move to head off an impending overload. Wait, there’s even more! The monster in your closet is still deeply asleep, which is why now is the perfect moment to summon an exorcist or exterminator, before it stirs. Are you getting the picture, Gemini? The very fact that you’re reading this horoscope gives you all the advance warning you need to sidestep potential glitches and diversions.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): According to my reading of the astrological omens, asking the BIG questions is highly advisable right now. Why? Because you are unusually likely to get really good answers to those BIG questions. Want a nudge to get started in this noble enterprise? Here are three recommended queries: 1. “What is the wild meaning of my precious life?” 2. “Who the #@$%&!* am I, anyway?” 3. “Where is this so-called ‘God’ I hear so much about?” Dear Cancerian, I will also urge you to formulate humorous, satirical BIG questions that inspire life to be playfully revelatory with you. Here are three: 1. “How can I fine-tune my friends and loved ones to perfection?” 2. “Are there shortcuts to getting absolutely everything I want?” 3. “How do I sign up for a life of nonstop pleasure, free from all discomfort?”
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): When people finally grasped just how radical Einstein’s theory of relativity was, a journalist asked him how he had arrived at such a breakthrough. Einstein said it was simple: He had utterly ignored supposedly fundamental truths. Dear Leo, please notice what that might imply for you in the coming weeks. Einstein didn’t dismiss a mere opinion or fashionable theory; he set aside theories so deeply accepted that everyone treated them as obviously factual. He didn’t waste energy fighting them, but simply proceeded as if they didn’t exist. Consider doing the same: Set aside at least one seemingly incontestable assumption and be alert for the new realities that then become possible.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The International Space Station orbits Earth every ninety minutes, so astronauts see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four hours. It’s a challenge to maintain their circadian rhythms. They must be disciplined as they stick to a sleep cycle that human bodies are accustomed to. But there’s a wonderful trade-off: the rare privilege of witnessing the rapid cycling of total darkness and brilliant light, which provides a visceral sense of life’s deep cadences at work. Your routine may seem similarly unsettled these days, Virgo. Transitions are coming faster than feels natural. But I suspect this disruptive blessing is giving you access to patterns that aren’t intelligible when you’re moving more slowly. You’re beholding the way things change as well as the changes themselves. This is a valuable gift. The insights will be worth the disorientation.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You Libras sometimes get accused of indecision, as if your careful weighing of possibilities were a weakness. But I see a different truth: You aspire to be fair-minded as you honor all the legitimate claims on your attention. So the problem isn’t your capacity for considering multiple sides of each story. Rather, I find fault with the culture you live in, which is obsessed with one-dimensional certainty. If I were your coach or therapist, I would give you permission to take your time and resist the rush to resolution. The most honest thing you can say may be, “I’m still deciding,” or “Both of these feel true.”
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You’re not a flaming expert at turning tension into treasure, but you have modest skills at that art. And now I’m predicting you will grow these skills. Before you jump to conclusions, though, please know that I’m not implying you will be immersed in stressful melodrama. I’m suggesting you will handle differences of perspective with increasing aplomb and curiosity. Instead of treating conflict as a debilitating hassle, you’ll try to find value in it. Some debates may even feel stimulating and fun rather than tiring. To take maximum advantage, enjoy the controversies as exploratory missions rather than as showdowns you must win at all costs.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I hope and predict that you will be wildly resourceful as you wisely experiment with love in the coming weeks. I hope and predict that you will research the art of tender, inspiring intimacy in new frontiers. Reinvent passion, you subtle intensity freak! Be a bold explorer who breaks the boring old rules! Dare to break open new varieties of sweetness and companionship that require you to innovate and improvise!
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): If you were on a walk and spied a dime on the ground, would you bend down to grab it? Probably not. Would you feel differently about a quarter? Maybe you have decided that nothing under a dollar is worth your effort. But in the coming weeks, you will be wise to break such rules. Symbolically speaking, the act of stooping down to pick up a dime will set off a chain reaction that ends with you acquiring a hundred-dollar bill. By saying yes to small, unexpected blessings, you’ll position yourself to receive larger ones down the line.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The coming weeks will be an excellent time to begin a building project on the scale of Egypt’s Great Pyramid or India’s Taj Mahal. You should at least initiate work toward some magnificent masterpiece or creation, Aquarius. According to my analysis, there’s a chance you could coax an armada of helpers to work on your behalf. And as you set out to accomplish your labor of love, I bless your quest.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Artists who specialize in origami can create structures far stronger than the flat paper they’re folded from. The weakness of being made from thin, fragile material is overcome through strategic creasing. Engineers now use origami principles to design everything from solar panels to artificial blood vessels. Let’s extrapolate these facts into a lesson for you in the coming weeks, Pisces. We’ll assume that your flexibility is a strength, not a liability. You will wield your pliability to produce a high degree of structural integrity.
Homework: You know what to do and you know when to do it. So do it! Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
Wassily Kandinsky: Composition VII
Poonja on desire and freedom
H. W. L. Poonja, often known as “Papaji”
“All desires actually end in freedom. Your desire is fulfilled and you are empty. The emptiness brings you happiness, but it is unconscious. You attribute your happiness to a possession, not the emptiness. It is the freedom from desire that gives you happiness.”
~ Poonja
Hariwansh Lal Poonja was an Indian sage. Poonja was called “Poonjaji” or “Papaji” by devotees. He was a key figure in the Neo-Advaita movement. Wikipedia
Born October 13, 1910, Gujranwala, Pakistan
Died September 6, 1997 (age 86 years), Lucknow, India
