Episode 49: Forest Bathing, Poetry, and Recovery: A Walk Through Central Park with Aaron Poochigian

Poet Aaron Poochigian shares how forest bathing, mindfulness, and Central Park guided his journey out of addiction and into renewed creativity. 

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Hello world, and welcome to Choices, Books and Gifts, where you always have choices. This store is dedicated to health and wellness, and recovery. It’s been serving the recovery community for over 30 years. I am the host of this podcast, which is called You Always Have Choices, where we dive deep into stories of transformation, healing, and personal growth. I'm going to tell you a little bit about our guest today, Aaron Poochigian. And, I'm going to read a little bio for you. So you know who we're going to talk with. All right. Aaron Poochigian is a poet, classical scholar, and translator who lives and writes in New York City. His many translations include stung with love.

A translation of Sappho. Okay. Thank you so much. And Marcus Aurelius' meditations. His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as the Financial Times, the New York Review of Books, and Poetry Magazine. His new book is out now, and it's called Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park. You can learn more about this at Aronpoochigian.com. We'll get into the spelling and all that later, so people will understand. Yes. Are there other ways they can purchase this book, like on Amazon or voice recordings?  Thank you for asking. Yes. It's available everywhere. It's available through Barnes and Noble, through Amazon, certainly. And also, you can purchase online, an audiobook online. We did an audiobook for it. And so that is an option on Amazon and through Familiars Press and other booksellers. Perfect, perfect. That's wonderful. I'm so glad you had that. Because it's important that when people hear you and enjoy you, they know where to park and to your book. All right, so if you don't mind, Aaron, I'm going to jump right into the questions. Is that okay? Yes. Please do. Question one: What inspired you to write about walks in Central Park? How did that come about?

That is a long story, but I will tell it as succinctly, I can. Alright, I'd always put a lot of pressure on myself to produce poetry, to not get writer's block, and to keep writing, writing, writing. I put a lot of pressure on myself. And then Covid hit, and lockdown hit. And, I kind of dried up creatively. And so I confess, I needed something to look forward to. There was nothing to look forward to at that time. And so, I confess, I reached out and actually contacted a drug dealer. I had tried cocaine recreationally in the past. And I was always afraid that if I got regular access to it, I would become addicted to it. And I did get regular access and was immediately addicted. It gave me what I needed during lockdown. It gave me something to look forward to, at least for the first six months. Right? And so I became a horrible cocaine addict.

I didn't have any friends who were doing it, so I didn't know that I was doing an exorbitant amount every waking moment. Eventually, after that, the initial surge and excitement of my new habit dried up again, and it was far worse than before. I became terribly isolated, as happens to addicts frequently, because I didn't want my friends and family to see what became of me, and also because I wasn't able to do my drugs freely when I was around them. And so I was horribly isolated; my whole range of experience was limited to my apartment and the corner deli to which I would walk. And so I had no new experiences. And that is the reason why I dried up creatively. I had nothing to write about. I just had my cocaine addiction. And so eventually I decided that I was going to have to quit this drug. But more than that, even, was the creative sterility. Like, I needed to figure out a way to start writing again. To be inspired again. I tried a number of different kinds of meditation, including transcendental meditation. I don't want to. I won't say a bad thing about it. I'll just say I wasn't good at it. My mind was too hyperactive. And so I got excited about a kind of meditation. I read about called Shinrin-yoku. In Japanese, that means forest bathing. And it's not just going into a wilderness and walking in the woods. It's walking in the woods intentionally, in which you itemize with your attention whatever each of your five senses happens to be taking in.

It's more difficult kind of meditation than one might think. I decided then, because I live in Manhattan and there aren't any wildernesses nearby, that I would use Central Park, which I see as a nature concentrate. It has even more, even an even wider diversity of species of trees and birds, for example, than a regular wilderness. And so, when I started, I went, yeah, walking to Central Park, I had no intention of writing a book about it. I just wanted to escape from my mind. In addition to the isolation, I'd become sucked up into my head because I didn't have any new experiences. It was just the same regrets about the past and the same worries about the future. And they were mostly worried about how I was going to get money to buy more drugs. And so what I needed was the present moment to escape into sensory experiences in the present moment. And so I would go to the park, daily for two hours. And originally, the rule was not to be high while I'm in the park.

Right. But I expanded that eventually to not being high. While I'm writing about the park, I eventually broke my meditation in order to do this. I started jotting down notes about my various experiences in the park. And then, when two of them linked up as a group that complemented each other, there's the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, which is densely forested and haunting. It feels like a monastery, like a religious space, and that contrasts with warm and rank just to the north, where there are roller skating parties, for example. And people play pickleball all day long. And so, when I got that contrast, I realized that this could be a rich work. Also, I wanted to share my experience reengaging with my senses, with the world.

And the book gave me opportunity to do that. There are two characters. There's the speaker who's like a know-it-all docent. He has all the answers and knows all the facts about the species of trees and birds.

So all of that, me needing to get back out into the world and needing to reconnect with the world after my addiction. All that inspired me to write the book Four Walks in Central Park.

Okay. That's good. That's great. Thank you. All right. What does Central Park mean to you as a person and as a poet, and as a writer?

I see it as a whole resort dimension. There are other parks are smaller that provide recreation that are great, but I see Central Park as its own little earth as its own world, and it is a world that is devoted to recreation and relaxation. Its whole purpose is to be an escape, a retreat from the concrete grid and the pressures of one's life. And so I think, I mean, New Yorkers are famously busy and pushy and frantic, and I have lived here for 15 years, and I've become one. And so that appeal of the park as a resort dimension, as a place to go to get away. It's important for everybody. But it's especially important, as I see it in New York, because New York is so loud and pushy and hectic. That's there. Yeah, perhaps that's why we need a bigger park in order to get further away. After all the stress of the streets.

Okay, Yes. I've been going to Central Park ever since I was a young man. And I have discovered parts of that park that I'm sure no one can even imagine, where there are little streams and hillsides and things that people know nothing about. I was a marathon runner. So I used to go through all over the park, and it is an amazing, peaceful, spiritual place that's for sure. Number three, why did you choose to do the tours in poetry, and what does that actually mean?

Got it. Thank you for asking. This tour, rather than being an expansive account that includes every detail.

Right. That would have been a prose account writing out in prose all the various things that I saw, would have been a very different to a series of tours and very much longer. I want to take a poetic tour. What I want is for my descriptions to capture the essence of an experience, to give the essential details rather than all the details. Also, poetry, and especially the kind of poetry that I write it is rhythmic. It has a regular metrical pattern, and it also includes rhymes, very contemporary poetry, but it includes rhymes and the rhythms and the rhymes they call forth call up a meditative state, a relaxed state, the rhythm like listening to music when you work out right. But the words themselves provide the music.

And so let me ask, let me interrupt for one second. These tours that you give, you get people, and you go on these tours, and you talk about Central Park through poetry. Is that what I'm going to stand? I certainly have the tour. The book is set up to be its own tour and to be a substitute for going to the park, but it also functions as a fully functional tour guide.

I have given a number of tours in the park to students at various institutions. I just did a couple of weeks ago, a tour for students at NYU. And we walked through slowly as I recited information about the passages. Sometimes we stop and talk about how I didn't cover every single statue, every single blade of it, That’s impossible, because it would have been impossible. It would have been too much, and I never would have finished. And so I introduced them to the selective details I include in the book, and then also gave them further background on the history of some statues in the park, for example, and the history of the carousel.

Excellent, excellent. So I know we've touched on it briefly already, but maybe you can, or, you know, briefly, you've talked about being a recovering addict. What role did Central Park play in recovery? I know you pretty much covered it by going there and Is that how you stopped the cocaine? Did you need a program? Did you just do it through this, adventure in Central Park? How did you stop using the drug, and are you currently off it?

Yes. Thank you for asking. I do credit Central Park for getting me on the road. That led me out of my addiction. An expert on addiction named Johann Hari says the opposite of addiction is connection. And I had become terribly disconnected while I was on drugs. And not just from people, but from my senses and from anything going on outside in the world around me. And so I'd become entirely, as I said, sucked up into my mental space. I wasn't having new experiences. There was nothing to look or see or look at or smell or see. There was just me and my laptop trying to write while I was high. And so I credit Central Park for getting me out of my head and back into the world where I can appreciate my senses again.

When I first moved to New York City, I was in love with it. And subsequently, that passion has died. But I've gotten it back. I'm in love with New York City again, and I credit my experiences, my meditations in Central Park, with, yes, reconnecting me not just with what's in Central Park, but with the world as well. And so that's how you stopped using cocaine? I mean, you said it was one of the reasons how did you completed it?

And so, yes, I did set restrictions for myself. And so that I, it was off limits for me to be high when I was in the park and off limits for me to be high when I was writing about the park. And I eventually started spending more and more time writing about the park I went to, a number of support groups early on, and that was also very good for me. In those. Yes. In those situations, you do learn so much. I mean, most addicts' stories are pretty much the same. They all have the same trajectory downward. And mine certainly did.

But I was fortunate in a sense, in that in the groups I joined, a lot of the members there, it was their choice between being in jail or being in this support group. Right. And so I could see from their stories and from people who went deeper, went further down than I did. I could see from their stories where my life was heading. And so in addition to all the wisdom I got from their stories, I also got sort of role models for what might happen to me. And that also frightened me, frightened me away from continuing to use cocai

All righty. Very good. Can you talk more about the concept of forest bathing? What is it exactly? What is forest bathing?

It is walking while meditating in nature and slowly, systematically, even itemizing each of the sensory experiences. Your. Yeah. That you are receiving. There are benefits, of course, just to being out in the woods. Nature provides in the air chemicals, almost like pheromones, that soothe the mind and soothe the body. But in addition to that, right, forest bathing gets you to focus on the present moment, the past, and the future. I mean, I'm obsessed with them. But Marcus Aurelius wisely says, “We never inhabit the past or the future. We only ever inhabit the present moment”. Right? And yet I was spending most of my time trying to get out of it in different ways, distracting myself from the present moment. And so, yes, I brought myself around then,

and did forest bathing in terms of properly that is, in terms of slowing down and systematically assessing what I saw. As I said, when I tried to do forest bathing, at first I was bad at it. I couldn't sustain longer than 45 seconds to a minute, but now I can meditate much longer. My mind is still pretty spastic. But I can get a good five minutes of meditation in before there's a lapse.

Okay. All righty. How can Central Park encourage mindfulness? Is it as simple as just taking a walk? What would you suggest for other people?

There have been days when I've gone to Central Park, when I've been highly distracted, when I basically didn't process or take in anything I saw around me. It was just a walk, and I didn't. I wasn't noticing anything. Those are the days I don't call them failures. You don't want to call bad meditation days failures. But yeah, you just keep trying to bring yourself back to the focus. Good. And so I would encourage them to do all the preliminaries to normal meditation. Right. That is slowing down, focusing on your breathing. Right. And then instead of having your eyes closed, as sometimes happens in meditation, certainly having your eyes open and being open more generally to sense impressions, you take you're taking in being super significant, having significance, greater than what they literally are. I like the carousel very much in Central Park. And so, yeah, I've meditated there, but what it gives me is just a whole world, I mean, a whole scene in the carousel of uninhibited play. And so that's another theme in the book, right? Play for adults. And it brings that about. And so you want to reach that by going through all the preliminaries of meditation.

Very good, very good. What kind of research did you do on the park? You know, I wanted to come up with all this? I've been a scholar, and I've done serious research. But as a poet, when I'm being an artist, and I'm trying to, and I'm in the creative mode, right? I don't do systematic research. It's what I call poet's research, which comes down to, oh, that's cool, I want to learn more about it. Oh, that's cool, I want to learn more about that. And so early on in my forest bathing in the park, I started allowing myself to break meditation to jot down notes. Right. And that's what eventually grew into the book, but it wasn't systematic. I would take pictures of a tree, for example I didn't know the name of, and then I would go back to this amazing book called The Landscape of Central Park that actually maps every single tree in the park. And so I could look up the species and learn about that, or I became an amateur birder as well. I would take pictures of birds I didn't know that I saw, and check them. There. And so I did research, and I learned a heck of a lot. But it wasn't systematic in terms of me going to libraries and reading hefty tomes about Central Park. It was me. Yes. Writing about looking up information about things that excited me during my meditation session.

Cool. Very, very interesting. What did you learn about the park that you did not know before? What kind of hidden secrets did you find? You mentioned some water attractions that I very much like. There's a cascade near what's called the pond. In the north Woods. Right. But what most fascinated me was that there used to be a city in what's now Central Park. It's in the Northwest corner. There was a city called Seneca Village. In the middle, early to the middle of the 19th century. And, there were two-story houses. It was like a suburb.

There were German and Irish immigrants, but most of the inhabitants of Seneca Village were Free State blacks. It was before the Civil War. And the city was generous. I mean, it's interesting, but the city was generous and bought them out. Right. And so, they bought houses. They did well in the deal, but still, there were real houses in Central Park, and they were raised; they were destroyed to make this artificial wilderness. What’s there now is a meadow. There are dandelions and daffodils and a number of trees around it. And so, yes, the city decided that our collective need for recreation, for somewhere to go, was more important than that city, Seneca Village, in the northwest corner of the park. I think it does offer so many people so much solace and exercise, and spiritual. It’s always good to be in nature. That's how I find spirituality and things. And I think Central Park offers all of that. That's why I have spent so many hours, days, months, years in Central Park. And I just think it's one of the most attractive things to me about living in Manhattan. It truly is.

May I ask you a question? Yes.

Did you did you grow? Did you grow up in New York City? Do you have childhood memories of the park? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I used to go to the castle. I used to go to all sorts of different odd places. Strange buildings in the park that we would find ourselves and my friends. That, in fact, sometimes, I don't want to promote this, but we would cut school and go to Central Park.

Right. And try to discover all these little hidden secrets that it had. And, I had some friends who lived right outside of Central Park, so they were very helpful in helping me find these things. But like the creeks in the water, you can't do that unless you really go into the bush of Central Park. You know, the way we used to do it, we used to actually just go on little discoveries, days, and see what it is, find out that no one else does.

That is beautiful. And that's one of the themes of the book. I'm glad that you mentioned that you cut class sometimes in order to go to Central Park, because the speaker in the poem encourages you who are working too hard to call in sick, to fake sick, and take four days off to tour the park in detail. And so that's what I'm jealous of. I mean, the people talk about the New Yorkers being big on nostalgia and reminiscing. They oh, they're always talking about the good old days before this mayor or that mayor ruined everything. And so I love my time in New York, but I wish I had childhood memories of the city, of the Central Park Zoo and the carousel and the dog statue. I wish I had those memories growing up. A writer friend.

It's not only memories, but it's stories like things that happened. I used to have a girlfriend who worked at Tiffany's, and I would meet her every day, bring her lunch, and say we'd go to the zoo, sit outside. And I remember, we're eating sandwiches. Once at a squirrel came right up and took the sandwich right out of her hand. It was very messy. Tons of stories and tons of wonderful memories. It's an amazing, amazing part of New York City.

All right. Do you think people take Central Park for granted? I certainly do.

I do, we also, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, friendships are an important part of our relationships. We also tend to take friends for granted. That's what I've learned. And so I've met New Yorkers, people who grew up not in Manhattan generally, but who grew up in the city, who have never been to Central Park, who have never been there. And so, that was, yeah, yet another motivation for me to write the book, right, to show to my mostly literary New Yorker friends that they're missing out on an entire universe, an entire universe that is just there to be enjoyed, that wants to be enjoyed. That’s its whole purpose. And so, yes, I mean, I gave book copies of the book to these friends in an attempt to kind of shame them. Finally, go to Central Park. Do you have a copy of the book with you right now?

No, I don't have access to the text of it. I'm sorry, I don't. But the cover's beautiful. It shows Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Manhattan surrounding the park, and the big rectangle of the park.

Good good. I was hoping to show the book just in case. What do you wish there were more of in Central Park? If anything?

I would have to say I wish there is even there were even more literary attractions. Attractions that have to do with literature. Central Park is big on literature in a bunch of ways. There's the literary walk at the south end of the mall, where you can see Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Burns. There's the Alice in Wonderland statue. There's a Hans Christian Andersen statue where he's reading a children's story to a duck.

And so that's big, but I want the connection. And then also there's all the Shakespeare stuff. There's Shakespeare in the Park. It's very literary as well. Right. But I would love the association. That's kind of what my book is about. Of the associate, the park will be associated even more with literature to make that an even stronger focal concern of the park. And so, yes, more on literature and literature.

Okay. I can see that and understand that you got into it briefly earlier about how you want the people to use the book, but that is the question. How would you like people to use your book in Central Park? Ideally, I see readers of the book using it as a full tour guide in the park that is taking it with them to the park and walking through the park, following section by section where each stop was. So you map it out for them?

Yeah, and there are their itineraries and maps in the book. Okay. And so that is the primary function. But also, you asked about how poetry is important. Yeah. Poetry captures the essential details. And so the second way readers can yeah encounter the book is as a substitute or a surrogate for going to the park. That is, I tried to enact to capture in the poetry itself, the process of forest bathing. And so both of those ways, as a tour guide there in the park and also as a substitute for going to the park, as a kind of literary forest bathing.

Excellent, excellent. So, if I were just getting started and what not. What? I just moved to New York City, for instance. What would you tell someone about Central Park, and what they should do besides reading your book? What are your thoughts about the park and how you want to introduce that to people?

I would tell them to take. Take it section by section. And so I would recommend starting in the southeast corner of the park near the Ritz Hotel, and starting with what's called the pond. It has a great number of attractions around it, like that dense forest, the environment, and the Hallett Nature Sanctuary. It has a beautiful bridge. And so starting there. Yeah, not trying to go too far because it's overwhelming in a sense. The thought of taking in everything in the park, you couldn't do it in a single day, or even maybe in a whole week.

So I encourage them to start small and start with the pond. It's beautiful. It's rich in koi and also other aquatic animals. And also it's famous. And so I would try to lure people in by mentioning that it appears in JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is obsessed with finding out where the ducks go. The ducks on the pond go in the winter. He never finds them. But he does go there exceedingly drunk to see them. And so I would encourage readers, you. Yeah. People who are encountering the park for the first time, take it slow and go small, rather than taking in a broad swath of attractions and being overwhelmed and confused, focusing on just 1 or 2 in the beginning, and slowly, step by step, making your way through the park.

I can't agree more. It is a piece of history and nature that needs to be discovered slowly, intimately. And that takes a long time. You can't do that. You know, you mentioned even in a week that Central Park is so vast, you know, you can spend months there really learning and discovering that park. But I love all your knowledge on it.

And, I'm interested in having a copy of the book on its way and reading it, and I’ll too go in the Central Park and trying to discover some of the things that you have put in the book. So I'm looking forward to that. I want to thank you so much for being on this podcast and sharing all of your knowledge and wealth of Central Park.

And in closing, we will wrap up this episode of the Choices podcast.

I hope our time together was inspiring and motivating. Stay powered and stay well. You can watch this episode and all episodes on our website. Choices gifts.com. We wish you peace and blessings, and we'll see you soon in another week or two. Thank you.