At the Feet of Great Persons

. Most of us, at some time in our lives have crossed paths with a great man or great woman. In a world of media glamour they may or may not stand out. But the objective measure is not necessarily charisma, or even "success" as conventionally defined. The important thing is the profound positive effect on others.
. Sometimes our lives are touched through spending time with them in books, seeing them perform, attending their lectures, or hearing and maybe singing their musical compositions, or even by just meeting them through television. Fortunate are those whose encounter is in person, in their physical presence.

. Lately I've been thinking about those greats impacting my life. In former times I would be calling them heroes, or idols. But both of those terms have been preempted for other categories of people in public life, far from the sense I would mean by them. So I shall call them paragons, since that word hasn't been damaged yet by overuse or abuse.

. Here are some of my paragons. Maybe I've missed an important one, or included someone with less of a reach into my life. But these are the ones I'm thinking of now, each for their own reason (left to right, top to bottom): my grandmother Guzaili, Benjamin Franklin, Swami Satchidananda, Jesus of Nazareth, Edward Abbey, Mohahandas Gandhi, Lily Tomlin, and my chamber choir director, whom I shall not name to protect his privacy. (Since he resembles the actor currently portraying Superman, I shall substitute that picture.)
. Also Bernadette Roberts, Henry Beston, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Louise Dickinson Rich, Emily Dickinson, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Alan Ginsberg, Domina Spencer, James A. Swan, Walt Whitman, Leonard Bernstein, the black-capped chickadee species, Lucille Ball, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, my mother Jenny Marie ("Jane") and the Unknown Angel, who cannot be depicted by Earthly means and thus is not seen here.
. I will try to highlight one each week.