The Gardeners of Dry Valley

I love to use this description and story about networking, and it has a habit of sounding gentle right up until the moment it takes you firmly by the collar.

Dig your ditches.

It comes from an old desert story. Three armies are stranded in a waterless valley, parched and close to perishing, when the prophet Elisha gives them an instruction that must have sounded like nonsense. Dig this valley full of ditches. There were no clouds. No wind. Not the faintest rumour of rain anywhere on the horizon. Just dig. And by morning the ditches were brimming with water, arriving quietly from a direction no one had thought to watch. The people had prepared the vessel long before the supply ever showed up.

Florence Scovel Shinn adored this image. She returned to it again and again as the very heart of active faith. You make room for what you are calling in. You behave as though it is already on its way. You dig, not because you can see the rain, but because you trust it is coming. The digging, she said, is the proof of your expectation. Faith without works is a dead thing, and the ditch is the work.

Now hold that thought, because I want to tell you a small story.

Once there were three women who lived in a valley where the rains were generous one year and stubborn the next. All three kept gardens that fed the whole village, and in the good seasons each of them had more water than she knew what to do with.

Their names were Iris, Marigold and Rose, and they could not have been more different in their habits.

Iris dug. She dug ditches out to the far edges of her land, little channels running off in every direction, even on the brightest blue mornings when the sky held no promise of anything at all. The neighbours found this very funny. “Iris,” they would call over the hedge, “why on earth are you digging? It hasn’t rained in weeks.” Iris would wipe her brow, smile, and keep digging.

Marigold, meanwhile, dug just enough to keep her own patch green, and then she stopped. “I have plenty,” she said, surveying her tidy beds with great satisfaction. “Why would I tire myself digging for water I already have? I am far too busy enjoying my garden.” And it was a lovely garden, it truly was. For a while.

And then there was Rose, who one bright morning packed up her cart and set off for the next valley over, where the gardens looked greener and the soil seemed to promise so much more. She went cheerfully, quite certain that her old neighbours would always welcome her and always trust her word, for had she not been one of them for years? But trust, she would discover, does not travel in a cart. It stays in the soil where it grew. She arrived in the new valley a stranger, digging from scratch in ground she did not yet understand, while behind her the old ditches she had been so sure of slowly forgot the shape of her.

Then the dry season came, as it always does. The streams thinned to a trickle and then to nothing. Marigold’s patch cracked and curled at the edges, and when she went looking for water she found her channels had long since silted up and forgotten her. Worse, the village had quietly found other gardens to buy from. The supplier they used to call had simply become the supplier they used to know.

But over on Iris’s land, something curious happened. A hidden spring broke open far upstream, in a spot no one could have predicted, and the water went looking for somewhere to gather. It found Iris’s ditches, still open, still deep, still patiently waiting. By morning they were full. And the whole village, parched and grateful, came walking up the lane to her door.

What the ditches were trying to tell us all along

Your network is the ditch. The referrals, the warm introductions, the client who appears out of a conversation you very nearly did not have, that is the water. And there are a few truths in this little fable worth carrying with you.

The ditch dries up. This is the one I most want the busy, brilliant women to hear. So many have said to me over the years, “I am stepping back now, I have enough contacts.” But the channel does not politely wait for you. It quietly silences. People are busy, memories are short, and the water does not vanish, it simply finds another ditch.

Trust does not travel in a cart. This is the gentler cousin of the first, and the one clever women miss most often. When you leave for a brighter, shinier valley, it is so easy to assume you will keep the warmth and trust of the people you are leaving behind, that the goodwill will simply follow you out of the door while you build something new. It rarely does. Trust is not a possession you carry, it is something that grows in the soil of showing up. You arrive in the new place a beginner, digging from scratch, while the goodwill you were so sure of quietly fades behind you. There is no shame in choosing to leave. There is only wisdom in understanding what you are truly leaving behind.

You dig before the rain, not during the drought. By the time you are thirsty, it is far too late to pick up a spade. The best networkers do their digging in the seasons of plenty, so that the water is already on its way before they ever feel the lack. Networking was never the thing you do when you need work. It is the thing you do so that work is already travelling toward you.

“Too busy” is the most expensive sentence in business. Every business breathes in and breathes out. The fullness you feel today is a season, not a settlement. The women who keep digging while they are busy are the ones who sail serenely through the quiet months, while those who downed tools find themselves scrabbling in dry earth, watching the calls they could have had go elsewhere.

And you simply cannot dig a ditch in a downpour. Trying to build real relationships in the middle of a desperate dry spell is frantic, muddy and undignified work. The ditches dug in calm, in faith, in no particular hurry, are the ones that hold when it matters.

Abundance, then, is not a reason to stop. It is the proof your digging works.

This week’s invitation

So I will not ask you whether you have enough connections. I will ask you something better.

Are you still digging?

This week, choose one ditch you have let run a little dry. One relationship you have quietly neglected because life got full. Send the message. Reopen the conversation. Reach out before you need anything at all, simply to keep the channel clear and flowing.

The water always arrives in the end. The only question worth asking is whether you have prepared somewhere for it to gather.

Keep digging.