Hobbits cause eruptions! Here, I'll unfold my Middle Earth roadmap. Up here--stark Lonely Mountain--Bilbo stole, and old       Smaug raged: on sheepfell, crag and mire,       downs and towns spewed molten fire. Frodo plods bleak Mordor's waste. Just when he mounts Mount Doom, it blows. And then that shield volcano near the Shire awoke--       fields smoke. These halflings just provoke       Earth-tumult. As you know, all folk reincarnate. So Sauron, Morgoth, Smaug unavoidably remeet you. The dogged war. How many lives before       the kinks of a dragonsculpted soul       hatched in a gold- and greed-lined hole heal? Long gyres indeed. And Gollum--hard to be civil with a hissing almost hobbit who strangled you, out of long wrong hunger       in the black under. No malice of course,       Just a lust for your preciousss corpse. The Great Wheel spins no moral, at least not             to me. Vulcanology too-- Some just get Earth (and monsters) hot.             And Happy New Year to you.

Mt. Doom on the beat-up cover of 'Lord of the Rings' after my 11th reread

• Shield volcano, massive flows near the Shire: not in Tolkien! But his Shire lies in the northwestern Old World. In the analogous corner of the New World where I live, is the Columbia Plateau, a basaltic lava flow covering a Shire-sized region. The Lonely Mountain corresponds roughly to Yellowstone's hot spot; Mount Doom, in dry Mordor in the inland south, would be some Southwestern volcano--maybe the San Francisco Peaks, near the Grand Canyon.
• Hobbits cause eruptions: this dream made me see the parallel between Bilbo's effect on the Lonely Mountain (provoking an eruption of dragonfire not lava, but still burning a town) and Frodo's on Mount Doom (destroying an empire). Long trek, slow tempering of character, treasure-cave, greed, renunciation of a treasure, fire... basically Tolkien retold Bilbo's tale, just on a vaster canvas in a darker key.
• The Great Wheel: reincarnation. I don't believe or disbelieve; I remember. Faintly, but enough to convince me. I'm over-protective of two arteries where I once got sliced--and bled out. I grew up in peacetime, but I can't sit by a lit window at night--I remember sniper fire. I fear crowds in churches--stoned as a witch. Forgive and forget may be the way of all souls, but I can't quite. At least... I can't easily forgive souls who, the last time we met, killed and ate me. Just no good at turning my other cheek so the cannibals can bite that one too.

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