I've been out of the studio today for health reasons again -- not my own health this time, but Tilly's. She has an immune system condition that requires monthly injections, which is usually a simple affair -- but with our local vet centre closed during the Covid-19 lockdown, it requires a trip to another town and elaborate procedures to do it all safely. Our poor girl hates every minute of it, so her reward for being a Very Good Dog is a walk and swim in the River Teign. 

Tilly loves water in all of its forms: rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans, she plunges fearlessly into them all. And had the morning been just a little bit warmer, I would have been right behind her....

"I am haunted by waters," writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River. "It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. 'When it hurts,' wrote the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, 'we return to the banks of certain rivers,' and I take comfort in his words, for there's a river I've returned to over and over again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy."

For me, that river is the Teign, running from Dartmoor to the south Devon coast.

"Everything in nature invites us to be constantly what we are," says American naturalist Gretel Ehrlich. "We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least -- a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts that only the waters of the imagination and psychic release can civilize. All such matters are delicate, of course. But a good irrigator knows this: too little water brings on the weeds while too much degrades the soil....In his journal Thoreau wrote, 'A man's life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant.' " 

I'll be back in the studio tomorrow. Today, I am following the river...and a wet, happy hound.

The passages quoted above are from  To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing (Canongate Books, 2011) and The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich (Penguin Books, 1985). The poem in the picture captions is from The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems by Gregory Orr (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). All rights reserved by the authors.