not all consultants are alike

I can't quite put my finger on it but being busy, makes you feel productive and when you feel productive, even little disappointments don't seem as much like set backs. My really sharp friend from Sunday School, Britt who worked for Peat Maverick Consulting had told me that Terrance Bray was the Managing Partner of their banking practice and that guy was in position to really change our world. He had worked for one of the largest banks in the country, rising to the level of Chief Financial Officer before "retiring" and taking the job that he had now. he had dozens of bank clients and if he liked our strategy, he could effortlessly recommend that his clients consider it. I continue to be interested in finding an easier way to promote our process than by calling banks and developers, one at a time and this seemed a realistic opportunity. And for once, a person in such a responsible position actually called me back and agreed to meet at his down town Atlanta office tower. I should have been a little bit put off when the day arrived that he'd told me that he'd call me to confirm, he didn't. Then, when I called him he agreed to take 15 minutes at 5 o'clock and meet us not in his office but in the food court downstairs in his building. Those seemed the foreshadowing of being dismissed. I was right. this was a nice guy and he claimed all of the resume that I'd been told but he was an accountant, dullish and unimpressable. He listened politely to our description of our process, suggested that it all seemed reasonable and he even told us the name of a guy from his previous employer in North Carolina who might take a meeting. He also dropped two names of people in their tax practice but he was simply not capable of getting excited about anything. Our conversation never got to the level of his even acknowledging that they had the opportunity to collaborate with us on a process that made money. He simply had too many problems of his own, I guessed. We agreed to keep in touch, which I knew would be my complete responsibility and to what end, I wasn't sure. We left feeling like we'd wasted our time.

up on the hill

Jill and I are members of a Sunday School class that operates in a discussion format that encourages group participation. There is a very talkative couple in the class, Britt and Rachel Pitell. They are extoversive guys, willing to talk about all of their child rearing issues. She is an executive in a commercial real estate firm, which was mildly curious to me while his role as a consultant with the global accounting firm, Peat Maverick really got my attention. One of the hundred insecurities that I have is that I have little experience in working as a consultant. I feel like I need a lesson in selling consulting services, accounting for such services and knowing how to transform a transaction-ally oriented relationship with a client into a long term one. The sad irony is that, I always believed that it was consultants - like Peat Maverick that ruined the Wacho Bank but I also saw my former employer rely heavily on them, pay them unimaginable sums to think through strategies that we had people smart enough to imagine and, for the most part, they remained independent. And, as I have felt the unexplainable hand of Providence nudge me in one direction or another, I was open to that possibility again when we got invited to a dinner party at the Pittel's home. It was a snap waiting for my opportunity to talk with Britt and I wasn't even surprised to find that he consulted specifically with banks. I was able to get him to tell me the names of his superiors and enlist his help in representing our process as a solution for them to advocate to their clients. I was even more delighted by the realization that our conversation was being over heard by a woman lawyer from the consulting firm Rat - Glassner, who also consulted with banks, and the federal government. Was this our entree to the FDIC? Before the evening was over I had two important conversation streams to prosecute. Come Monday morning, I placed calls into both resources and had follow up appointments scheduled in a matter of hours.

Still fighting back the anxiety to keep committing time to resource building, instead of calling on prospective clients, I knew that I had one more Land Trust to go see. The Georgia Trust had been prominent in all of the reading that I'd been doing and their Executive Director, Kathleen Eden had a super reputation. She was a Wall Street lawyer from Alabama who eschewed all of that, returned to Auburn University and had gotten a Masters degree in Forestry and now ran the largest land trust in the state. I had called her 90 days ago and never reached her but that morning, while checking e-mails I saw one, to me, from her. She never referenced my earlier attempts to reach her but said that I had been recommended to her. I was flattered and noted the coolness of this being the first time that someone had reached out to me. And this was an important someone. We agreed to meet at her office in Preston, Alabama later that week. (The Georgia Trust and it's sister, the Alabama Trust share offices in Preston, Al because that's Kathleen's family home and she negotiated that when she took her job. The Ga Trust also has offices in Savannah and I had made a contact there a while back and look forward to meeting those guys too, but Kathleen was the undisputed boss.)

To keep it from being an entire week of talking with no one who was going to actually pay us, Matt and I dropped in on our prospective client Richard Dings at the One Georgia Bank. He hadn't seemed especially receptive the first time we met him but he had encouraged us to keep in touch. This time he told us that if we wanted to go look at a tract that they owned, which seemed to fit our model, we could but he made no promises. As Matt needed to do something else, I took the directions to this property in a far, northern suburb of Atlanta and started out. I found the property easily enough and was aghast to see "blue pipes", as far as the eye could see. These pipes, indicative of utilities in the ground with their access stubbing sticking straight up in rows reminiscent of corn has given the them the slur name of blue pipe farms. Clearly, One Georgia Bank was not the only owner of this kind of distressed property as there were at least 4 subdivisions contiguous to this one. As luck would have it, the road was blocked by a chain and massive pad lock, so access was, by car wasn't possible. And I was disappointed anyway because the graded lots, with curb and gutter and asphalt streets hardly looked like a conservation eligible site. But I pulled on my parka, stepped around the end of the barricade and started walking down the deserted street imagining what this hill side must have looked like before the bull dozers and what it might have looked like after 145 houses were built and occupied. The reality, as if in some parallel universe were homeless lots and streets that went to no where. But, at the bottom of the gentle grade, a full half mile for the entrance was a magnificent flowing stream, the Settingdown creek which bordered this and the other derelict developments. The stream, a tributary of the Etowah river that would be completely dead in 5 years following the construction and occupation of the houses yet to be built. Fertilizer, waste of all kinds, storm water run off from the asphalt all would have polluted this stream and harmed a primary drinking water source for the city of Atlanta, or so I was thinking as I trudged back up the hill. Then, as if on cue, my cell phone rang and it was my bankrupt friend from Sunday School who had been a developer and whose father and mother had been lured to Atlanta but the promise of prosperity in the real estate boom. My friend, was just calling to check on me but while we were on the phone he asked me to do something for him. He asked me to get to the top of the hill and to turn my ear into the wind and tell him what I heard. On that frosty cold afternoon, in the slanted light of the remains of the day I told him that I didn't hear anything but the wind. "Exactly," he grimmly proclaimed. 12 months ago, I would have heard carpenter's nail guns and the good natured, rapid fire Spanish chatter of landscapers. I would have heard bulldozers churning and dump trucks rumbling. I would have heard the sounds of people working. Despite the lure of honorable ecological conservation, my friend begged me to recognize the staggering human cost being born by legions of people now unemployed by the depression in the home building industry. There was no more eloquent evidence of the confluence of these two realities than the silence I observed on that hill.

at the direction of Mr. Drake

At the direction of Buddy Drake I placed my first call to my former employer Wacho Bank to see if I could get a fuse lit to launch this project. Wacho is the lien holder and is owed about a million dollars on the wood lands that Buddy was preparing to develop into building lots when the market crashed. We needed to get them to do two things and I'm not sure which one was going to be the most difficult. They would have to subordinate their lien to a conservation easement which means that they had to essentially release their collateral and once the easement was recorded and gifted to the land trust, they had to help us find investors who would buy the tax credits. Buddy (and the investors) would take the proceeds from the sale of the tax credits and pay off his loan. The bank had to believe that he would default on his loan and they would be forced to sell the property at a huge loss to be motivated enough to want to participate. But Buddy had told me an obscure fact a month ago that I remembered and thought that I might be able to use to our advantage.

Buddy's loan officer at the bank was a woman named BJ Watson. BJ had been at the bank longer than I had and while I didn't know her well, I knew that she was smart, thorough and took great care of her clients. I also knew that she now hated her job. The wonderful bank that we had both been proud to represent had, through a series of mergers become a greedy, uncaring place run by consultants and Wall Street analysts that were indifferent to both client care and employees. The grand culture that had made that bank the envy of the industry 10 years ago had become such a wreck that it failed, requiring the federal government to orchestrate a merger, more like a shot gun wedding to a bank in California - Wells Largo. I was willing to bet though that BJ still cared about helping her client, Buddy and would champion our cause. I was about to find out if I was right.

BJ and her colleague, James Marston met us and spent almost 2 hours exploring our process and exactly how we suggested that it would help Buddy and them. We talked strategy about how to prosecute our case through the rat's maze that was this huge bank, now run by people in California that none of us knew. But we identified the resources that we did know and agreed to keep in close touch. Then Matt and I left to go talk to the accounting firm Peat Maverick, with whom I had made a contact during a Sunday school party a week earlier. Peat Maverick was Wacho bank's auditor and I was hoping that we could accomplish two things there. Narrowly, I wanted them to recommend to their client, Wacho Bank that they employ our strategy in cases like Buddy's and broadly, I wanted them to see us a a solution for their other client banks problems. How I got to them is an interesting story.

working the network

Button Gwinnett was a revolutionary war era cotton and peanut farmer who owned a plantation north west of Atlanta. This noted land owner, farmer and merchant was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence. What he could have never imagined is the amazing amount of suburban sprawl that raced from Atlanta to the north, primarily following World War II and swallowed up every inch of ground for 40 miles out from the city center. The successful real estate developer and former bank client of ours, Buddy Drake who had offered to let us explore the economic impact of conserving Gwinnett county land that he had planned to develop and where I had seen the huge deer a week earlier, seemed eager to get started. While that was refreshing I knew in my heart of hearts that we didn't have a land trust in our consort that would take only 23 acres nor had we successfully opened a communications line with his bank, the mortgage owner. And as truth is often stranger than fiction, the bank was my former, 20 year long employer who I knew had the capacity to be capricious and unresponsive. But I remembered my mantra, you eat an elephant one bite at a time and I set out to find a land trust in Gwinnett willing to work with us.

From the directory of Land Trusts approved by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources I found Carol Hasslin and the Gwinnet Range Land Trust, a name I found ironic as there certainly isn't any range land in the midst of that suburban sprawl. The refugee from the 60's who was in her 60's and the part time director of this pitifully small trust delighted in that ironic fact as well and over coffee one morning told me her story and that of her employer. I could have guessed that she'd been an activist her entire life and 11 years earlier, when the developers of the Mall of Georgia, certainly one of the most grotesque examples of the power the consumer was being planned, she helped form the trust to do battle with the developers. She lost that battle and the war also as in over a decade the Gwinnett Range Land Trust had only managed to conserved 750 acres. We had that much property in play already in only 7 months. Even though she seemed to be a caricature of a conservationist right down to her Walla bee shoes and tie dyed shirt (worn smartly under a leather jacket trimmed in fur, of which I wondered what the animal rights people thought) I admired her conservation spirit and determined to show her how to conserve Buddy's land, if I had to do it myself. Her board was scheduled to meet in 3 weeks so I gave her the survey so that she could find the real estate, I promised to attend her meeting and I left wondering how best to tease the bank into conversation.

From that meeting, Matt and I headed for Wilkes County, a little over an hour east of Gwinnett. The week before, in a moment of real inspiration, Matt had seen a newspaper advertisement offering 250 acres of timber land for sale. He had cut out the ad and gotten me to compose an e-mail to the seller suggesting that he explore the economics of conservation, as opposed to an out right sale. Well, the land owner took the bait, called us up and invited us out for a look. It was a long way to go but as we had so few prospects off we went. With only a little struggle we found the country store where we'd agreed to meet and introduced ourselves to this country fellow about our age who had been a timber broker in better times and was now just a buyer and seller of land. We climbed into his 2 ton pick up truck and drove all over his large land holding which proved to be wholly unexceptional but majestic in the quiet of that clear, winter afternoon. While Matt extended himself to impress Mr. Pollock in how much he knew about timber land management - which is nothing except a series of buzz words like "chip and saw" and " saw timber" I sat in the back and wondered if this was a good use of our time. In the hour we were together though I got Pollock to tell us that he had graduated from UGa in Forestry and knew everybody in Georgia in the timberland business, something that I filed away for future reference. I knew I'd made a friend when we got talking Georgia football and we stopped at yet another country store for a wedge of hoop cheese, crackers and a cold beer. Matt sat in the truck and talked on his cell phone to God knows who. We all agreed to keep in touch as Matt unnecessarily gunned his Mercedes out of the gravel driveway of the store and headed for Atlanta.

to complete the trip, you are going to have to help some people

Since nearly the same week I left the bank, Jill and I have been hosts of an adult Sunday School class that is designed for parents of younger children. The church believed that such a demographic needed the support of a network of friends in similar circumstances, given the size of both Atlanta and the church itself and the reality that most lived far from families that once provided all of the interpersonal support needed. While initially I felt like the oldest rat in the barn I quickly got over that and just relaxed and started enjoying the people and stories that arose out of the discussions. In deed, the class proved to be a nice outlet, a useful distraction and we began making new friends instantly and that's always a bonus even if it meant extending ourselves. Anything worth having is worth working for. During the slower weeks (for Sunday schools anyway,) over the Christmas holiday the class invited the head of the church's crisis counseling center to come speak about managing holiday stress. The speaker was a retired Presbyterian minister who split time between our church and the Veterans Administration hospital in Atlanta where he worked with veterans, especially those with substance abuse problems. I found him to be a tad bit old fashioned and only barely able to resonate with this younger, generally more confidant crowd. But I also identified with him and wanted to contribute where I could so I spoke up publicly for the first time about being without gainful employment as Christmas approached and how we were handling the stress. After the class concluded that day, a fellow that I knew only as Max came up to me, shook my hand and admitted that he was going through much the same thing only he wasn't a confident enough public speaker to have talked in class. Max had been a real estate developer of some type, before the current economic collapse so I invited him out for breakfast to see if he had anything to offer our enterprise. Honestly, I liked the guy and though I was determined to keep focus on my work, I wondered if he just needed a friend. Because of his real estate experience, I thought that I could sell my sabbatical to Matt - like I had to. Matt couldn't have cared less who I saw over the odd breakfast hour.

Max and I met bright and early at a popular spot, had a bagel and then got in his pick up truck to look at property that he'd developed. Riding out there he told me that he'd grown up in North Carolina, attended Wake Country Day School, went to Davidson and on to UNC for his MBA. Our NC backgrounds attracted me instantly. Then he finished the story. Following Business school he'd worked for UPS as a traffic manager but saw other people making so much money in the real estate business that he wanted to try that. His dad was a very successful builder in Cary, NC and encouraged him. In fact, dad loaned him the money to buy his first tract, in Cobb County which he showed me. It had been a very pretty field, which he bought, rezoned and sold 90 lots to a home builder and doubled his dad's money in less than a year. Emboldened, his dad doubled down his bet and put up stocks and bonds to collateralize a still larger development loan. Then, as he and his wife were approaching retirement anyway, they put their Lake Gaston estate up for sale and bought a very expensive house in suburban Atlanta so as to be nearer their 3 grandchildren and to explore going into business here with his son, Max. The rest is history. The housing market collapsed, they couldn't sell a single lot, the bank foreclosed on dad's stock accounts, the expensive old house on Lake Gaston wouldn't sell and Max's parents were struggling to afford the mortgage on the new house outside Atlanta. In the mean time, Max was terrified that his wife was loosing faith in him on the grounds that Max wasn't working hard enough to find a new job (in the worst economy in a hundred years) We'd stopped in a church yard to drink coffee and talk and I realized that it was almost 11 o'clock and I hadn't even thought about my own problems, as I listened to this fantastically terrible story. Through it all, though I discerned that this was a very bright, thoughtful guy who - like lots of others had just gotten caught in the rip tide of this awful economy. I wondered what it might be like to have him in our association but I couldn't guess how Matt might react to having someone so obviously smart around. Then I remembered that I hadn't made a dime yet. I was getting a little ahead of myself even thinking about needing to staff up. The good news was that Max wasn't looking for another speculative job in real estate and hoped to go back to UPS or someplace respectable and stable. It was hard to admit that my little company was neither.

trust for mountain land

While Matt and I are blasting away in Atlanta, my old friend Dallas hasn't entirely dropped out of sight. Out of the blue he calls me the next day and asks if I would come talk with Realtor friends of his who work in the mountain counties of north Georgia. Shortly thereafter, I have a cup of coffee with Tom and Jo, a husband and wife team who are representing a very unusual property just outside of Jasper, Georgia. I make a follow up appointment to meet Tom Lawrence in Jasper and we go see Elk Lodge. Elk Lodge is a 450 acre tract that has been in the hands of a prominent but eccentric family since the early 1950's. We learned that the matriarch of the family is old, ill, lives in South Carolina now and rarely even visits the property. We wound up a steep and curvy mountain road until we can to impressive stone gates. Inside, we traveled a paved drive that reminded me a little bit of the road up to the Biltmore House in Asheville. The forest on both side of the drive way was virtually manicured it was so lush and one could see 12 foot chain link fences that secured the perimeter of the property. Apparently, from 1965 until the late '70's the owners of the property rescued animals of all kinds and the fenced area that we drove through had once upon a time contained the only elk herd east of the Mississippi. The driveway ended at the steps of a 20,000 square foot log home that was literally perched on the edge of a gorge. We toured the home itself and despite its massive size, it was wholly unexceptional and needed serious updating if it were to ever live up to its billing. The site tour resumed as we descended into the gorge to a remarkably wide and flat, grassy flood plain that was the valley floor. A creek ran the lateral half mile of the plain and it had been dammed up several different places by beautiful rock walls creating pools, waterfalls and eddies where, again once upon a time giraffes, hippos and other exotic animals, saved from bankrupt zoos or private collections had roamed. There was a stone mill house with a water wheel, aviary for raptors of all kinds even a bear habitat, now all empty and derelict. Tom took us up a very rutted and muddy jeep trail to a wind blown field of wild flowers and broom straw on the ridge line opposite the old lodge itself. It was cool, breezy and beautiful there but more importantly, I could get a cell signal so I called Dave Kookenbach at the land trust we'd gotten close to to tell him about this site. Dave immediately warned me that Pickens County, Georgia was not only a poor county but a very disorganized one. He doubted that there was any long term steward available to hold an easement on such a tract that size and politely suggested that we stick to looking for broken subdivisions. As it turned out, upon learning that our process didn't involve actually buying the land (and paying him a commission,) Tom the broker went remarkable chilly on us and wasn't even willing to give us the appraisal documentation that he had on file. We tried to discuss how we might compensate a broker who brought us a transaction but it was clear that we hadn't thought it through and he wanted none of it. Broker sponsored opportunities were simply going to be a problem, I feared. That afternoon might have only been entertaining except I learned where downtown Jasper was and that happened to be the home office of the Trust for Mountain Land, a small but respected land trust to which I had been referred. Several days later, Matt and I were in the car, headed back to Jasper to meet Robert Rankin, the executive director.

Dr. Rankin held a PhD. in Biological Studies from Wake Forest, was a former Navy Seal and was a direct, super intelligent force of nature. He occupied a cramped office on the second floor of what passed for an office building in Jasper. Despite his modest surroundings - relative to almost anything but especially the plush, corporate offices of the Trust for Urban Land, Dr. Rankin was impressive and grabbed our concept immediately. It didn't take long to process that though he seemed marginally employed he was in a job that he loved. His was a small organization founded by wealthy Atlanta businessmen who had vacation homes near there and had wanted to conserve the forest around their conclave to protect their investment. They had founded a land trust to do just that he'd been hired to expand their scope of service. Two ambitious guys from Atlanta who needed his expertise suited him perfectly. And from him, we heard for the hundredth time, that we were absolutely onto something. Different from Kookenbach at the huge, national land trust, this guy was innovative, dedicated and maybe most importantly, he was hungry. He processed immediately how important Belmont Downs was to us (all) and offered to do a preliminary study on the conservation possibilities there that might help us push that rock up hill with the bank. Very different from Kookenbach, he offered also to see what the long term stewardship options really were in Cherokee County and that was bound to put some face cards in our hand. Over lunch, I learned two other things about him that seemed to cement our relationship. He grew up in Mt. Holly, North Carolina not more than 2 miles from my family's home and he did something that, in 30 years of work in professional settings I have never seen any one do. He drank 2 beers at lunch!

banks in georgia

While pleased with the progress we were making assembling the team of people necessary make our process work, I can't shake the feeling that actually getting business is going to be my responsibility and I can't afford to spend too much time on activities, however important that aren't business generating. So, bright and early Monday morning, I start a communications stream with people I know at 2 different Banks. Linda Pressley and I worked particularly well together 10 years ago. She is 6 or 7 years older than me, has never married but managed to avoid the all too familiar trap of letting her work become her life. I always admired how responsibly she treated her relationship with the Presbyterian Church and she had an elegant demeanor about her that always appealed to me. She and I always seemed to connect personally so I felt sure that she would help me if she could. She is now a senior credit officer with a bank whose business model it has been to buy small community banks and allow them to run, virtually autonomously, rather than fold them into a single brand. I guessed that meant that they would have member banks that had done plenty of real estate lending and would be suffering now, as a result. Linda happily took my call and we had a productive cup of coffee a day later. She told me indeed that her bank had $500 million dollars worth of bad real estate loans and gave me the names of several of those responsible for the management of that portfolio. I started e-mailing and calling her contacts immediately, using Linda's name hoping to get past the inevitable defenses erected to defend against sales people.

Concurrently, I put a call into Penn Ackerman. I never knew Penn especially well but he had been a journeyman executive at several banks and recruited me for a job some years ago while he was at Bank of America. I'd seen him around socially, knew that he was a regional executive with a bank based out in Gwinnett County and felt sure that he'd remember me. He did remember me and while we didn't speak over the phone initially, we did communicate irregularly by e-mail for several weeks.

In the case of both banks, I learned that problem real estate loans were devastating their performance, monopolizing their executives time and that neither seemed to have the first intelligent human resource necessary to re imagine solutions for these issues. Both banks assigned personnel to these broken deals that had made the bad loans in the first place and seemed astonishingly clueless about how to fix them. Each had as their core strategy, the belief that one of these days, somebody was going to come along and simply buy their problems from them. Nobody impressed me with their willingness to entertain an innovative solution. Consequently, I had to be tirelessly persistent in my follow up, I had to force myself not to take their rebuffs personally and I had to reorganize my approach to each bank as I ran of momentum with a particular name I'd been given as a contact person. Oddly, this just seemed like a game to me and I never got too frustrated. I believed in what we were doing (or more accurately, planning to do), I had the strength of my convictions and I believed that if I persevered, somebody at one of these stupid organizations would, sooner or later listen. That didn't mean that they would hire us but I was relying on an old business maxim that stressed that if you make your calls responsibly, sooner or later you'll make your goals.

new and different activity

Not altogether sure where this would lead, Matt and I resolved to call an odd, former client of ours who had been a real estate developer when we knew him several years ago. The real estate economy had gotten so bad and he was approaching retirement age then, neither of us knew if he would be much help. As it turned out, he was gracious and charming and delighted to hear from us. We went to lunch and he told us the amazing story of how he'd seem the coming collapse and had managed to sell off most of his properties and kept millions of dollars of profit. He went on to say though that he had still got caught with one tract that he had bought from a farmer, gotten rezoned and permitted to build 50 or 60 houses but had done nothing else to the 25 acres. He liked our idea and offered to try to work with us. He also offered to pay for lunch, a gesture that I appreciated but Matt grabbed out his (our) corporate American Express card and paid the bill as I grimiced at the unnecessary expense. Despite the fact that the tract size was small we agreed to take a look.

On a frightfully cold afternoon we found the very pretty woodland tract, nesteled between 3 ugly and, more or less broken subdivisions. When I was in the 7Th grade, our class read a book called "On the Beach." this was a terrifying account of the end of the world. Armageddon had occurred and a group of survivor sailors on a submarine was traveling around the US coastline dropping one another off at their home states so that they could die at home of the radiation sickness that would eventually kill everyone. The images of the desolation were so vivid that I'm reminded of that book occasionally. Today was one of those days. The builders in those adjacent subdivisions had just walked off the job months earlier. Derelict tools and half finished projects were everywhere. There were no workers anywhere, just tattered marketing tenants, falling down sighs of welcome and muddy asphalt. But while standing in a never to be used drive way and looking at our prospective site I saw something amazing. I saw 3 of the largest deer I had ever seen. Horse size really and prancing playfully in the woods. They were magnificent and I remembered in a flash that when we're successful we'll be saving their habitat. I left there resolved to find a way to get this project to work, to help this old friend and to hopefully see those deer again.

I had relationships of all kinds in my years at the bank and on the following Friday afternoon, as Matt - again had decided that he need the afternoon off I got my Rolodex out and started to see who else I could get some inspiration from. I had called Dave Kookenbach at the Trust for Urban Land and, as I feared the site that we'd just seen was too small for his group to consider. I had to find another land trust to help us with such smaller scaled opportunities. My first call was to Jim S. the executive director of the Atlanta office of a national environmental advocacy group. It seems an extraordinary coincidence that I had one, longstanding relationship with a legitimate expert in the field I found myself in so I was bound to determined to lean on him for advice. The advice I really wanted was "who else can I put into my net work." He gave me 3 names of influential people. Hans was the director of an environmental "think tank" associated with the University of Georgia. (as my daughter, Mary had graduated from there and I had grown very fond of that place, I was warmed by that lead.) Jim also told me about the largest Georgia land trust that had a sister organization in Alabama. I made a special note that this group, The Trust for Georgia Land also operated in western North Carolina, my home state and familiar also. The director of their coastal initiatives was a close friend of Jim's and he entreated me to call him with our most thorny problems as he was a "genius." Third, he told me of the Director of a land trust in North Georgia that was small but resourceful and was run by an ex-Navy Seal who was a character that I would either like or not. Lastly, he mentioned a very small trust in Gwinnett County - the county that I had worked in the last 7 or 8 years of my banking life, so I was particularly familiar with the human resources that group used and since the woodland tract that was now our next best hope for an engagement was in Gwinnett County, I conscientiously wrote down the director's name and contact information. I thanked Jim for his help and called each of these people even though it was now late on a Friday afternoon. I was only able to get Hans at the think tank in Athens but he was just a s helpful as Jim knew he would be and he gave me much food for thought. What he gave me in sufficient measure though was encouragement.

Silence isn't always golden

No matter how many times I tell myself that setbacks are bound to happen, I can't seem to recover as quickly as I'd like when they happen. Following a series of, what seemed to me to be productive meetings with Bill B. at First Community Bank, then a conference call with his board and a few key advisers we've entered into a period of radio silence. They'd asked for a final proposal, they'd asked questions about our fees but made no mention of them being unreasonable and they'd even wanted to know what we would do first. But now, nothing. Last week I tried twice to get Bill to tell me where they were and got a deafening silence. Such discouragement leads to all kinds of second guessing and self recrimination. Honestly, no matter how good I feel about our progress and the righteousness of our intent, until somebody validates us by hiring us, in the dark recesses of my mind I know that we are just another of the universe's good ideas that we weren't good enough to sell.

Hayden wrote a choral work that I can't get out of my head called "The Creation" that thematically explores the Psalmist's lament, "out of the depths, I cry unto Thee, O Lord. Lord hear my prayer." Prayer habits are some of the most private affairs of all, I guess because, despite the cultural acceptance of corporate prayers, congregational responses, table graces and prayers offer at a child's bedside, nobody talks much about it. And despite the Apostle Paul', and my own mother's entreaties to "pray ceaselessly" my own experience has been wholly more inconsistent. Until recently. No, that's not altogether true, there have been a few periods in my life when the stakes seemed so high and my personal sense of dread so disabling that I prayed ceaselessly for a favorable outcome. And such episodic influences has enable a cultivation of a more or less regular, ritualized routine of prayers of thanksgiving for blessings that seem undeserved. Over time, I've come to reflect prayerfully on the richness of the experiences that I've had and how I've learned from them. I attribute the opportunities for success in this and other endeavors to the accumulation of such insights and have been sincerely thankful for them. But these days, I am in near constant need of Divine reassurance that I'm not going to let everyone down, that I'm not going to fail miserably, that I'm going to find the strength and fortitude to keep going. I've got two friends, one close one casual who are both struggling with terminal illnesses. I know them to be strong guys with spiritual groundings. I imagine that they pray ceaselessly for deliverance from their illnesses, but sadly neither seems likely to improve. I watch my partner Matt, valiantly try to keep up appearances when I know that his heart is broken, still I'm selfishly terrified enough of our present circumstances to insist that he row the boat harder, notwithstanding his distress. Where's my compassion? Then I realize that I've spent my whole life cultivating the ability to feel sorry for myself and to use that as an excuse for insufficient effort to legitimately succeed. The role of the victim of some circumstance is deliciously tempting. When one is a victim, the pain of responsibility is more easily shifted, denial possible. But in my heart of hearts I know that prayer seems designed to change me, not the world. So I pray for the strength and the wisdom and the fortitude - maybe so as to remember that I claim each, in some measure and I go back in and face the day, as bravely as I can, not feeling very brave today.