For those who live and work as expats June is always a time of partings. Wonderful, interesting people who have shared our lives for some years are moving on to new posts and new lives somewhere else. It is a sad time, but it is also important to remember how rich are lives are because of all those amazing people we meet, people who we would never have come to know and love is we had stayed safe at home. This poem, an old poem from 2013, which I just rediscovered hidden away in a lost folder, is a reminder to appreciate those friends who share our path for a while.

Confluence

Sometimes lives meet like rivers,

far from source

brought together by geography,

by destiny,

by the chances of topography.

Converging  in a whirl of soul and water joined,

in waves and eddies and swirling sediments

tributaries join and twist and turn and hurtle on towards the sea.

Friendship and love and familiarity are the sentiments,

together making lives more interesting,

more complete, more glittering.

For meeting,

sharing,

parting

the journey is the richer

Dhaka 2013