I was watching A Cowboy Christmas Romance on Netflix this past weekend—January 3, 2026— when, with 18 and a half minutes left to go in the film, a storm began to rattle the cattle ranch where the plotline took place. First dust (soon thunder, rain). Suddenly, I am 23 on a three-month solo road trip around the United States, trucking my silver Volvo sedan I called “Antelope” (after the Phish song “Run Like an Antelope”) across Arizona in the wake of a wild dust storm.

My car felt mauled in that dust storm, but I learned—quickly—as a Midwesterner who’d gone to college in the Northeast, that the only way to safely survive—G-d willing—was to sturdy my insides, so that my insides were the furthest thing from feeling as mauled and shaken as my car.

Thus, I was able to focus. On the road. The vastness of nature. By focusing the vastness within.

Poet Anis Mojgani has a poem called “Shake the Dust.” A recitation over and over that “this is for” the ones who need to shake it—the dust—to let go of the external holdings that have taken hold. “The fat girls.” “The little brothers.” “The schoolyard wimps.” And even so too “the childhood bullies that tormented them.” And on and on. Like a car barreling through a dust storm. Like the horses and ranchers on cattle ranch in a Christmas romance movie bracing hold.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, where my apartment is—no matter how compulsively clean I am and have always been—often overtaken by dust. I feel like I am constantly on my hands and knees with tissue, or cloth, or paper towel, or raw-dogging with my bare palms gathering dust.

But I feel like I live in forever constant mystery of knowing from whence and where the dust first comes. From what and where and whence it shakes. What it is, when it is that it storms.

The day before laying on my couch in a puffy robe watching A Cowboy Christmas Romance, I stood outside the Apple store in downtown Brooklyn after practicing yoga with a friend. We were trading spell-casting stories. The various things we’d done in recent months to surface and confront and ultimately clean out and dust up the dust. I asked him if he felt it too—the acceleration of his intuitive and clairvoyant and alchemist abilities while the world unraveled around us. While we found ourselves needing to be sturdier and sturdier in the eye of the storm.

It’s a storm these days. A dust storm. A rainstorm. A snowstorm. Hurricane. Tsunami. Monsoon.

My car felt mauled that day in Arizona. I had just left the Painted Desert, a spectacular site featuring nature’s ability to turn itself into awe. Again and again. Nature’s built like that. Scientifically. Spiritually. Able to balance the forever multiverse that is divinity and practicality with focus of some kind. Because that’s what balancing is. Focusing. On something. A point.

I wish we did that more often. Us. Humans. That particular kind of balancing act. With focus.

And we’re able to. Us. Humans.

Instead, the same morning that I watched this very white and very Christmas and very “American” movie in a fluffy Phish-themed robe that a rabbi gave me several Hanukkah’s ago, the current President of the United States invaded Venezuela. Likely for oil. Likely for cash. Like for a lack of focus that which can be scientific and practical and spiritual and divine at once.

I’ve been toying with what it might mean to be focused on this: being sturdy in a storm.

Not to ignore the weather. Not to barricade myself inside and pretend it isn’t happening. Storm.

But rather stay present in my silver Volvo. Keep my eyes barricaded to the road.

That dust storm was one of the most terrifying driving experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Right up there with a snowstorm through which I drove in February 2025 from Brooklyn to a gig at a college in the very, very top of New York state. Right up there with a torrential rainstorm from Nashville to Kansas City with a friend on our way to see Phish. Right up there with an ice storm from upper Manhattan to Western New York—also for a college gig—when I dove-tailed into a snowbank and my rental car broke down in the middle of the Allegheny Mountains.

The dust storm was the first. The first time I learned what weather could do in conversation with a car. The first time I learned the necessity of keeping my eyes focused on the eye of the storm.

I am not in denial of the storms that are flooding and destroying our society drop by drop.

But I am also not in denial that focus—being unwaveringly committed to the bit—is what got me through those storms safely (even though the Western New York one landed with a dead car).

I wonder if that’s what Anis’ poem is also offering when inviting us to “shake the dust.”

To dismantle the dust-making itself. To dust up the dust so deeply, that the dust evaporates too.

Fifty seconds after the storm scenes starts in A Cowboy Christmas Romance (spoiler alert, in case you plan to watch it), one of the protagonist’s mothers says to her lovestruck and still stubborn as a mule son, “…ask for help. What choice to we have?” And our cowboy does, reluctantly.

I can be a lovestruck and still stubborn protagonist too. Lovestruck with idealism for collective liberation and world peace. Stubborn in all the ways I all too often try to do so much myself.

But I think that’s a thing I’m dusting up and shaking off. A bit to which I no longer want to commit. It was cute to drive around the country by myself for three months, and I’d do it again. But the lessons I gathered, the dust storms through which I learned to drive, were all a series of things to which I can only apply in coalition. There is no making it through these storms alone.

And I wonder what happens, then, when we are sturdy together. When we make up myriad eyes in the unrelenting storm. When we go deeper and deeper and deeper below the dust.

When we balance the focus of that which is practical and that which is divine.

When, like nature, we balance and focus on both the earth, each other, and ourselves.

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