Letter from a Virus

Dear citizens of earth,
I need you to stand, sit or lie down –
to listen to my voiceless words.
You have seen me appear
as a whisper and then flare up like
an inferno across a dried-out grassland.
In days, weeks at most months,
your lives have been upended,
the existence you have known,
all but dismembered.

Charts that track my passage
look like split drops of deep
red wine, spreading, blurring
and blotting out counties,
countries and continents.
Wuhan, then Wellington, Wyoming –
even Waterval Boven.

Some of you have started
by disregarding me –
‘It’s just another flu, it will soon pass’.
You will soon be invited, begged and then
finally ordered – to stop connecting,
communing and coalescing.
Your stubborn pride will make
some of you resist, until my
irrevocable passage becomes clear.
Only as those around you start to
suffer, some even to the point of
passing away – will you finally start
to hear me.

You will realise that I’m here
to challenge, question and redefine
what relationship and connection
mean in your existence as humanity.
You will be ordered into lockdown,
because you don’t take me
seriously enough at first.

So predictable as a species,
you will reject, rebel and re-reason
what is right in front of you.
Some nights you will weep, or rage
or curse, but none of this will deviate me
from my truly intended purpose.

Yet finally, once you heed me
and your doors, gates and cities
close down, strange things will occur.
You will, tentatively at first, start to
genuinely reach out to those around you.
Family members you have ignored,
friends you neglected, children or
parents you vowed never to speak to –
all the reasons for these, long forgotten.

You’ll start to question the systems,
societies and institutions you have
simply subsumed yourselves into.
As parents you’ll wish you’d
spent more time with your children,
instead of chasing security and sustenance.

As children you’ll regret how your
own lives had begun to matter more
than, stopping to remember and honour
the parents and elders, who’d
conceived you and made your
existence and identity even possible.

Whatever your age, WhatsApp, Skype,
Zoom and an endless procession of
acronyms will become your new
ways of meeting and bonding.
Strangely, these digital conversations
will be occur with much more meaning
and sincerity than many of those
you had face-to-face.

As team members you’ll look at
screens of faces during digital meetings
and truly see, listen and connect in ways
you never could before.
You will start to wonder about and care for
how your neighbours really are.
You will leave your houses, when permitted,
to gaze at the bluer sky, smell the trees
you never could before – and sense the beauty
of silence around you.

Satellite pictures of polluted cities
will look like they’d been scoured clean
Fish will begin to swim in seas, rivers
and waterways they had vanished from –
even under the empty canal bridges of Venice.
Forests will begin to breathe again,
their trees reaching up from their
cowered forms, to embrace the sun.

Organisations that sold ego and other poisons
will collapse, replaced by those that
serve community and build meaning.
You will begin to honour the forgotten
professions of farming, nursing
and teaching – including those called by
their souls to clean your houses and streets.

Music, poetry, reading and art will
be remembered as sources of inspiration,
rather than just investments.
You will truly understand that you
are not individuals but part of a much
greater whole, that you never saw before.
In weeks, months – or years, the earth
will become another World.

And then, as silently as I came –
like a previous cousin of mine, Spanish Flu –
I will vanish. You committed when
that pandemic came, to change,
yet soon afterwards you drifted
into a societal amnesia.
I just hope that you don’t forget
what I’ve been sent here to teach you.
Don’t disremember who I am,
or why I was born.

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 31 March 2020

 

A Language of Optimism

We are being challenged in these times
to use new language when we speak.

Resilience: not simply the ability to resist–
more the suppleness of a tree that bend
in an enraged South-Easter, as it bounds back
to a unique, singular shape.

Endurance: more than simply lasting –
rather the riverine tenacity of water,
as it cuts its way from up-country escarpments,
to a majestic oceanic conclusion.

Commitment: far beyond mere steadfastness –
but an ability to rise from that bed we
sunk into last night, to stand firmly into
our newly emerging selves.

Persistence: a step ahead of just lasting –
to become a daily pledge that binds us
to stand steadfast, when all we once knew
begins to dissipate.

We are beginning to listen to our whole selves,
as they are more able to speak what’s true,
even when all else that seemed valid – blows away.
Viral infections attack only those frailest parts
of our humanity, our physical frames.

Yet even as those mysterious collections of
muscle, bone and somatic fluids begin to falter,
our cardinal humanness emerges:

What is the chemical composition of Optimism?
How would one ever see Determination under an X-ray?
When could an EEG ever measure Hardiness or
Robustness of spirit?

So, whilst we race to develop a numinous
inoculation to immunize our physical forms,
let’s recall a vocabulary that will be a true vaccination for our healing –
daring, audacity, steadfastness, fortitude, endurance
and benevolent compassion.

Words like these will leave us collectively immune
to any epidemiology. Enable us to foster
what we most need – a tenacity of hunger for a
life enclosed deep within the Spirits we are.

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 1 April 2020

 

As Winter Comes

Our streets are silent again tonight.
This malaise has its own way
of being hushed and soundless.
An absence of others around us
dawns deeper as each day passes.

We’re sliding inexorably into
autumn in this Southern Hemisphere.
We’d become so used to the sun
burning off clouds and weather,
that might have held us down.

Perhaps this year, as autumn fades
into winter, we might have to
pick each tree bare of dead leaves.
Come spring we may have to
sow them back again, tree by tree.

We’re being asked to find new ways
of being free in the world; within ourselves
and between one another.
We need to learn to take time
to speak out in uncommon ways.

We’ve spent so much time
forgetting what truly matters –
perhaps it’s earth that feels we have
significant things to remember,
reasons we have simply forgotten.

Why we are here? What did we
came for? Who we need to be?
How we can live into that?
Where we now need to go?
Answers to all of these are new.

Time and space is what we now have.
A chance that’s been created to wonder.
A chance to forget so much that
really doesn’t matter.
Will we take it, or simply wish our
way back to what once was?

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 29 March 2020

 

 

owning my truth

(In honour of ‘There’s a Hole in my Sidewalk’ by Portia Nelson)

i walk out through my door.
there is an unnerving silence that greets me.
i hesitate….feeling uncertain and helpless.
this virus isn’t my fault.
it takes all of me to start walking.

i walk out through my door again.
the unnerving silence is still there.
i hesitate again….i’m curious about my uncertainty.
i look for who to blame for the virus.
it still takes a lot for me to start walking.

i walk out through my door once more.
the silence is allowing me to hear what I’ve forgotten.
i hesitate less….i think more deeply about this.
i wonder what my contribution to the virus is.
i start walking with less hesitation.

i walk out through this door, that is not just mine.
the silence is filled with sounds I just haven’t heard before.
i step boldly forward….i wonder what I might give.
i own that the virus isn’t just happening to me, it’s from me.
i start to walk towards answers and solutions.

i walk out through our door.
the silence is now a sound too.
i know that i am part of the cure.

i walk into that possibility.

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 2 April 2020

 

Always inspiring to see the positive change in individuals after completing our Coaching for Development programme

 

 

We invite you to join us in exploring Integral Coaching and how this might change your life, and the lives of those you interact with. Join us to see if our methodology is a good fit for you and you’ll have the opportunity to talk to the Course Directors about our approach and ask any questions you may have regarding the Integral Methodology, examples of case studies or the coaching courses that we offer.

Presented by Janine Ahlers, Certified Integral Coach® (MCC) & Craig O’Flaherty Certified Integral Coach® (PCC)

Directors from the Centre for Coaching

This informal information session will start with some details on what Integral Coaching is and how our courses are structured, and end with lots of time for Q&A. This event is open to the general public – no need to be a coach – and there is no charge to attend.

• What makes this style of coaching Integral? Why choose an Integral Approach?
•  How can this style of coaching make a difference in the corporate world? 
• Why choose and ICF approved programme? 
• How does it lead to people becoming self-correcting and self-generating resulting in a greater sense of satisfaction, meaning and purpose?

Coaching for Development (CfD)

Introduction to CfC and CfD: Tuesday 4 May:  18h00 – 19h30 CET

To RSVP, please email us at: info@centreforcoaching.ch

 

The poem tonight comes in two forms.  One being the words which find a way of combining to generate a way of considering what is happening around us in new ways.  The other is a picto-poem (see link below)– where words and imagery are combined to engage and create more sensory feel for what’s being said.  Let me know how it changes or adds to what you read.

This universal silence (words)

There’s an unfamiliar silence in our world,
one that floats over lakes, dams and ponds.
Forests or walks – where we used to wander –
are still. Their silence broken only by hums of
tender shoots; as they pop through glossy, moistened soil.
We’ve never heard what that sounds like.

It’s as if our own mind-thickets have started to echo.
Filled with leaf-rustles or whispers of grass sways –
that waft in on this tentative new hush.
We are now able to listen for things we’d forgotten,
like love, kindness and recognition. It glides around those
kitchen chairs, stoeps* or discarded tyres we’ve begun using again.

Perhaps we should give these noises names.
We gave one to this Virus, yet its inescapable passage
has stripped away our clamour, to release these
hums, swishes and whispers. It’s as if these sounds
chant into a sky that is nowadays empty.
Life is becoming a passage through silence.

*verandas

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 4 April 2020

This universal silence (picto-poem)

Craig O’Flaherty 

Transfixed to a Curve 

When 
will we 
begin to truly see. 
We watch screens tinged with 
red circles and ascendant, ski-slope curves.
We start to feel that desperate need to escape all that
is happening around us. We seek what we know or are familiar
with, as ways of re-assuring us that we’re just in something temporary.
It’s like we must watch a mythical global-games commentary, truly transfixed
to see if our curve has peaked and if there is a place where this force of nature
prevails. Where our capacity for resilience and coping might just emerge as we
embrace practices of cleansing hands, wearing certain clothes, covering our
faces, socially distancing, herding, proximity – a vocabulary that was
there before. Now, it means new things. Some of us live
in an illusion that things will return to normal.
We’re redefining that word. What we once
expected no longer happens.
The newly typical
is emerging,
Slowly.

What
we most
fear is this curve
beginning to rise again.
We push this away as our new
social anxiety. One that we would rather …
Curves inevitably change direction
We wait for ours to
flatten, sink
away.

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 11 April 2020

 

 

Shrinking Back

We once conquered this world
and blithely defined our own
borders and land masses.
We naively drafted maps,
argued and fought over
who belonged where,
and kept redrawing them –
when it didn’t suit our purpose.

Now the world has claimed
itself back and redraws
its own patterns.
Daily maps of this globe
get covered in silent
circles of viral spread– like
blotting paper marked
in contagious red ink.

This did not need to happen,
but it has. Lines get redrawn
by the earth itself, as more
borders close each day.
Some now even bar their own
citizens from a return to home –
or isolate them in lockdown.

It’s becoming a world where
rite of passage may need new
types of passports and visas.
Airline fleets lie stranded
on runways – patterned crosses
on airfield graveyards.
We’re unsure when they might
fly again – or if they ever will.

Perhaps the globe never really
wanted us to fly – but we
imagined it and simply did.
What do we now need to see
that our humanness cannot?

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 28 March 2020

 

 

A Mystical Virus

Let’s not pretend – we never saw it coming,
we did.
Let’s not pretend – we didn’t hear the cries,
we heard them.
Let’s not pretend – we’ve never seen this before,
we forgot that it happened previously, in other times.
Let’s not pretend – we weren’t fully aware,
we just didn’t listen when it first appeared.
Let’s not pretend – we didn’t know what to do,
we delayed to do the necessary.
Let’s not pretend – we weren’t living in fear,
we felt like running, with nowhere to go.
Let’s not pretend – we believed it wouldn’t happen to us,
we ignored the numbers until they bellowed back.

We’ve spent generations to raze forests,
suffocate air and poison seas.
Now the World has spoken back
in ways we might finally listen to.
A mystical, red fire implores us
to change things – lit by a wisdom
beyond what we know.
So let’s not try to just put it out,
until we truly hear what’s being said.
Once we’ve understood, we need to use
that heat to burn a new path,
its illumination to reveal that way.

Craig O’Flaherty

Published 27 March 2020