Dig Three Feet.

Monday, a flatbed truck pulled into our driveway carrying what looked like a mountain of bluestone, gravel, brick, and sand. Attached to the back was a forklift—the kind I’ve seen countless times delivering materials to Pat’s construction sites. Only this time, it was parked in front of our own house.

Within minutes, nearly a third of the driveway disappeared beneath neatly stacked pallets of stone and piles of material.

I stood there looking at it all, wondering one thing.

How on earth is one man going to do all this himself?

Fernie prefers to work alone. He had his own approach to building our new front stoop. But after talking it through with Pat, a master builder, that changed.

Pat listened and said, “No. Dig deeper. Dig three feet.”

Three feet? That’s nearly three times deeper than Fernie would normally dig for a project like this.

Pat has spent a lifetime building things that last. He knows what has to happen below the surface long before anyone notices what’s above it.

I’ve been thinking about that all week.

Dig three feet.

By the second day, our front yard looked like chaos.

The old stone walkway I’d walked across for years was now a pile of broken rock. Sand that had invisibly supported everything beneath it was heaped on top of my poor plants. The entrance to our home looked worse than it ever had.

And yet...

Every bit of that disruption was necessary for what would come next.

It made me wonder if that’s why real change can feel so unsettling. We ask for a new life, but before anything beautiful appears, so much has to be unearthed. There is work to do below the surface.

Because we can’t create a different life while continuing to think in all the same ways. Lasting change asks us to go deeper; to shift old assumptions, familiar fears, habits we’ve been standing on for years, and the stories we’ve accepted about who we are and what is possible for us.

For a while, it can look as though our lives have become a construction site. We focus so much effort on changing what's visible: the circumstances and outer conditions of our lives.

When Pat says, “Dig three feet,” he isn’t preparing the stoop for today. He’s preparing it for what he knows will come: freezing temperatures, torrential rain, shifting ground, and the weight of years. He isn't assuming those things won't happen. He's building so the stoop can withstand them.

Isn’t that what we’re doing in our own lives?

Being human has its rigor. Circumstances come that we don't like and certainly don't want. Our inner work isn't about creating a life without winters. It's about building a foundation that can sustain us when they come.

We are learning to rely on our inner strength, on the practices that reconnect us to who we really are, and on something far greater than our circumstances.

Not so we can control everything that happens around us.

But so we aren’t undone by it.

We are learning to build a life that rests on something deeper than our circumstances.

That foundation determines everything that comes after.

From my table to yours,

Mary