The compassion of Tara
When I was nineteen I was involved in a serious motorcycle accident. I had been racing with some friends on a mountain road, crossed the centerline on a turn and hit a car head on. In the days that followed, the pain of the trauma I suffered began to fade, like the chemicals that develop a photograph on a piece of paper. What remained was an image of the interior of a helicopter, and the faces of the paramedics who rescued me and flew me back to the hospital where I'd been born, giving me another chance. My uncertainty about what career to pursue in this life had been replaced by the desire to turn the tables on my suffering, to put to good use the gift of my experience that made me better able to help others transcend their own crises.
The following year I took an EMT class, and got a job with an ambulance company doing transfers to and from convalescent homes. I spent time working in an ER, an urgent care clinic, and dispatching ambulances for a private company before getting to work on their 911 response units, with a paramedic partner. I still wanted more responsibility, so I went to paramedic school myself, working for a provider in a rural county for a couple years before getting hired by the public ambulance service in San Francisco, on the year of its centennial. For someone who wanted neither to be a firefighter nor an administrator, but merely work in the field as a line medic providing patient care, it didn't get any better than that. I'd been there a year or so when one of the twenty year veterans I worked a shift with told me about Tara.
As her legend goes, Tara was a bodhisattva in a prehistoric civilization on this planet, millions of years in the past. After many lifetimes, when she finally reached enlightenment, she did so in a female incarnation. As a female buddha she became a manifestation of the divine feminine. She is the buddha of compassion, who can rescue us from our fears and move us to a safer place. As such, Tara is the patron saint of paramedics. Since learning that, I found a medallion of Tara at a Tibetan Buddhist shop in the city, and wore it around my neck every time I went to work and wore a badge on my chest.
Tara helped me do my job for more than fifteen years there. Because I found that for all the procedures that paramedics can perform and all the drugs they can administer which sometimes prolong the patient's life, all that is really just an excuse to be able to be there with people in their crises. To be able to offer them kindness and comfort, to reassure them that they will get through what it is they're going through-- even if their physical body doesn't-- to distract them from the burden of their pain with lightheartedness, that's my real role. Both on the superficial physical level, and the deeper emotional and spiritual levels, I strive to competently do all I can to help alleviate their pain, stabilize their crises, and transport them to a higher authority for further evaluation and treatment. But I can't save anyone's life-- the best I can do is to give them an opportunity to save themselves. Whether they heal or not isn't up to me.
When an altar appeared on a fence in the neighborhood where I now work, I decided one morning when I was getting off duty to hang my Tara medallion there instead of in my locker. I figured that the people there trust me to protect their lives, why shouldn't I trust them to honor what I hold to be sacred as well? When I drove by the altar on my way to work a few days later, Tara was gone. I stared at the blank space where she'd been, and felt like I was staring into the blank eyes of a friend who had died and wouldn't be coming back-- I was going to have to go it alone now. I went through all the stages of grief over the loss-- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Whether it was a school kid, adult kleptomaniac, or Tara herself who took the medallion, they obviously need it more than I do. Besides, it's probably my own karma coming around for all the shiny things I coveted and stole back when I was a juvenile delinquent. Any intense experience we have in this life with another person, it seems like sooner or later we wind up experiencing both sides of it. The other thing is that to give something to the world as an offering-- and wouldn't it be best if everything we did was done as an offering-- is to not expect anything back for it. No particular result or reward, no return on an investment, save for the joy that comes from helping someone else.
I wound up getting a small statue of Tara and putting it up on the altar, in an attempt to turn the other cheek. Because it would be pretty inappropriate to remain in judgement of the thief of an emblem of compassion, after all. Whatever we have to pass through to get there, in the end we have to come back to Love. To that place where there's no you or me, just one spirit moving through this world, coming to know itself on its way back home.