I hadn’t really thought about how it would feel to be a river before, constrained in more and more concrete to hold you down because you keep growing more rageful, or confining you to a culvert like Birmingham’s Rea, so you are forced to skulk underground i don’t think I’d like it. Rivets are supposed to meander, it is their coping mechanism.

I have recently been enjoying Mossy Earth’s Youtube videos about returning beavers to a Scottish farm in efforts to restore the riparian ecosystem there.
Your post made me wonder if we could therefore view the beavers as medical professionals in this context, taking steps they feel best to heal the river with a little dam here, a flood and flow there. They know the rivers deeply and intimately and perhaps understand what is needed to heal the constraints we have set out.

https://www.mossy.earth/projects/riparian-restoration-glassie-farm