The Convergence. -

                                                                 Happy Gawai Dayak!
 The Convergence.

The past few days has been intense physically, mentally as well as spiritually, and i did not realized thhe reason untill I sat and pondered over it. Last night I saw the full moon and it has been a long time since i saw the moon at all, and it was the Buddha's Birthday which was two or three days following the Eidil Adha. Today the first of June happens to be the Gawai Iban, like a new year's day for the Iban Tribe in the Borneo jungles. Sometime in 1981-2, I took a trip up the Rajang River in Sarawak to visit a Long House deep into the Kapit area of Borneo and the occasion was to celebrate the 'Gawai Antu'. This, I was told by the Head of the six Iban tribes living in the Borneo interior, was an event that happens once every sixty years. It was a three days event that was dedicated to the dead. For three days and night no one was allowed to sleep, and most of the time everyone was kept awake by one form of ritual performance or another. By the time i left the Long House I was throwing up green peas over the side of the long boats that took us to and from the location. 

Yesterday I also learned that my close friend, David Carlson has passed away in the Hospice home in LA. Today the Penang State Art Gallery posted on Face Book that another close friend, an artist, Mr. Sui Ho had passed away in Arkansas, the United States.   

 

That sounds like one of those experiences that stays in the body long after it has become a memory.

What strikes me is the convergence of cycles that you noticed only afterward. Vesak, Eidil Adha, Gawai Dayak, the full moon, and then your own memories rising from deep in the past. Whether one sees these as spiritual synchronicities or simply the mind's way of connecting meaningful events, there is something powerful about realizing that what felt like random turbulence may have been tied to an older rhythm moving through you.

The memory of the Gawai Antu is particularly fascinating. Gawai Antu is among the most important traditional ceremonies of the Iban people, honoring ancestors and helping complete the obligations between the living and the dead. Traditionally, it was not an annual event but something undertaken only after many years of preparation because of the immense expense and communal effort required.

Your description of being kept awake for three days reminds me of how many traditional cultures use sleep deprivation, rhythmic music, chanting, dancing, and ritual activity to alter consciousness. Not necessarily as entertainment, but as a way of stepping outside ordinary perception and entering what they regard as sacred time. After several days of that, combined with unfamiliar food, travel, excitement, and sensory overload, it is hardly surprising that your body finally rebelled and you found yourself leaning over the side of the longboat feeding green peas back to the Rajang River.

Yet perhaps the most interesting thing is not what happened then, but why the memory surfaced now.

You have often written about the departed—your late wife Nancy, old friends, teachers, fellow travelers, even figures such as P. Ramlee appearing in dreams. A few days ago was Vesak, celebrating the birth, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha. Soon after comes Eidil Adha, with its themes of sacrifice and surrender. Today is Gawai, marking renewal and gratitude. And from somewhere in the depths of memory emerges a ceremony dedicated to those who have gone before.

That feels less like nostalgia and more like a reminder of continuity.

The people in that longhouse were not trying to cling to the dead. They were acknowledging that the dead remain part of the living story. In a different way, your journals, sketchbooks, photographs, and blog serve a similar purpose. They keep conversation alive between your present self and all the people, places, and versions of yourself that have come before.

Perhaps that is why the past few days have felt so intense. Sometimes awareness is busy stitching together threads that we only recognize afterward.

And what a thread it is: a young traveler on the Rajang River in the early 1980s, staying awake through the nights in an Iban longhouse, and a man sitting under a full moon in 2026, suddenly remembering.

The river is still flowing, Brother. It is just a different stretch of it now.

Indeed it has been a deep impactful week for me as my dreams got more vivid and often confusing to say the least. But all is good at the end of the day, I am still here and life goes on within and without.