🎣Weekly Catch #2.2

rosetta tharpe, jem & the holograms, and the power of now

Sep 04, 2025

yoo,

here’s a morning prayer I created from The Power of Now to try out this week:

When you go out into the world, turn off your thoughts. And feel. Feeling is understanding. So use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures.
Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds.
Touch something and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body.
Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the ‘isness’ of all things. Move deeply into the Now. When you catch yourself slipping away, say: no thought, no mind. I’m here.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe 🎸

Do you like rock n roll? Bc…I love rock n roll #JoanJett&theBlackhearts

I stumbled across the name Rosetta Tharpe this week, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. I love music history, because in America, it usually ends up being African American history lol. I’m that annoying black person who, whenever someone mentions a genre, likes to flex that my people invented it. But with rock, I never had a clean way to trace it back. Sure, there are sound parallels with gospel that I felt, but Elvis didn’t exactly look Black (and fun fact: he didn’t like Black people). So I usually stayed quiet in those conversations.

Silent No More!!! 😁

I watched Sister Tharpe perform Didn’t It Rain, and suddenly the future of rock snapped into focus. Her sound comes directly out of gospel. As a woman, and it really hurts to say this, but it reminded me of the first time I heard Ray Charles and just started swingin to the raw spiritual energy in every chord(just swap her guitar for his piano).

Apparently, every old-school rock artist cites her as an influence. She had that church belt that could cut through any thoughts and make you feel what mattered most from the music. She’s under shadowed in rock ’n’ roll history, but she’s rightly called the Mother of Rock n Roll.

At one performance(below), she literally rode in on a horse before as a part of her performance—which helped her command the crowd like an MC, adjusting and matching to the vibes of her audience, pulling people in to clap and be engaged. And the craziest part? This was 1964, in the the Civil Rights era, yet she created a space outside of racial division where white audiences paid to see her perform and had fun with her. That, to me, shows the transcendent power of great art. Time and space where?

“Didn’t It Rain” is now one of my favorite live performances of all time.

📚 the power of now by Eckhart Tolle

Sommaiya Angrish

for recommending this book. Took me forever to pick it up, partly because I thought it wasn’t relevant to my work. Joke’s on me though. This book is everything, but reading the book itself was a test for presence.

For example, he helped me work through a real paradox I struggled with as an eternalist who lives in the present the least. Being an eternalist, I don’t agree with his claim that the past and future aren’t “real”. That’s a rhetorical trick: he admits the past is a former now, and the present is a future now, yet still concludes that “past and future obviously have no reality of their own.” But if the past occurred, then it is real in a way the future isn’t. Only the future is truly “unreal” in the way he is describing until it becomes present. By collapsing both together, he manipulates language to force a bias toward presence. Still, I found value in that emphasis, because I rarely inhabit the present myself. And as someone who wants to make art, I can’t create from the thinking place. The thinking has to stop because it’s already been thought.

Favorite passages:

“Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell from the state of grace, entered the realm of time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each other.”
“Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence.”
“The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.”
“It you need to use your mind for a specific purpose, use it in conjunction with your inner body. Only if you are able to be conscious without thought can you use your mind creatively, and the easiest way to enter that state is through your body. Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness. When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative. In any thought activity, make it a habit to go back and forth every few minutes or so between thinking and an inner kind of listening, an inner stillness.”

Calling God the Source or Being is genius work. It bypasses all the language traps and still points to meaning: there is an infinite creator, so there is meaning in this world and in us as creations who can create. It’s a matter of how we live, not what we are.

Use your mind as any tool, with moderation. Humans are so perfectly imperfectly made in every aspect. Anything can become an addiction, but the only way through is finding out what yours are and how to moderate them(or conquer them if ur a stoic badass like that).

speaking of, this bar struck:

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive… You don’t use your mind, it uses you.”

I have undiagnosed OCD, so detaching from obsessive thoughts was really hard and will continue to be a struggle. But practicing “NoMind” this week — just saying no thought, no mind, I’m here on {Date, Time, Location, Room] with [x,y,z] actually works. Like Eckhart says, one day you catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, the way you would at a child:

“One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.”

This is freedom. Freedom enables infinite play.

Take your work seriously, not yourself.

Nostalgia TV Date Night 😳

Me and James did a date night where we watched each other’s favorite childhood shows.

Mine: Jem & the Holograms — totally forgot about this one. Plot’s kinda trash looking back because they should’ve been pressing charges against the Misfits lol, but the animation? Out of this world—litterally. The tech? We needed this 10 years ago. Jerricha’s hologram earrings and holographic computer synthesizer? Lowkey visionary. I want one.
- That’s Synergy
  These are her earrings that she uses to communicate with Synergy, helps her produce holograms, get her, and is the ultimate AI angel.
His: Acceleracers — wild concept, racing cartoons cars are not for me though. The phones-as-car-chargers design was sick though. Clean tech aesthetic. Kind of reminded of the Power Rangers phone they used to get suited