Understanding Dharma
The word "karma" has long since entered everyday English, understood loosely as payback for wrongdoing — good, bad, or quick, depending on how fortune turns. This post looks past that familiar idea toward dharma, a related but distinct concept, drawing on Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and figures such as Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder.
Read the postPeri Hoskins is a writer whose work draws on years spent in different corners of the world, and the impressions those landscapes leave behind. The blog captures fragments of that journey, sketching the kind of restless curiosity that fuels a life spent reading, writing, and listening. Readers looking for the background to his books will find entries that hint at the experiences shaping his storytelling, from long road trips to quieter moments of reflection along the way.
One strand running through the site is a fascination with ideas borrowed from Eastern philosophy, especially the relationship between karma and dharma. The writing uses sources like Jack Kerouac and his circle as a starting point, then moves toward a more personal interpretation of how action and purpose might fit into a creative life. The tone is thoughtful rather than academic, inviting visitors to sit with concepts rather than rush toward conclusions.
Posts also explore the craft of writing itself, the slow accumulation of material that eventually becomes a novel or memoir. There is attention to the small details that anchor a story: a conversation overheard in a bar, the light at a particular hour, the slant of weather across a continent. For anyone curious about the working life of an author, the blog offers a window into how observation eventually becomes prose worth sharing with readers.
Beyond the books and the philosophical notes, the site feels like an ongoing travelogue of the imagination, a record of a writer thinking aloud. New Zealand provides a home base, but the writing ranges outward in every direction, picking up voices and vignettes along the route. Visitors returning to the page can expect fresh pieces that continue to braid travel, literature, and lived experience into a single unfolding narrative.