For today's sefirotic combination, Endurance in Humility, it's good to look at the suit of Pentacles. The 7 card captures the endurance required of a gardener — not only over the course of one season, but over the course of many seasons for a garden to grow and flourish. This is not only endurance, but patience and love.
The 8 card, Humility is often described as an image of an apprentice — someone who works for a master of a trade and learns from that master with true humility. That true humility does not discount that talent and ability that brings the apprentice to the master in the first place. It is an acknowledgment of the need for direction and guidance coupled with respect for the master who gives that guidance as a spiritual path. For both the master and the apprentice are in a spiritual relationship that enables both to grow. In a sense, they are equals — one has simply gone further down a path and can help the other on the way.
I have seen this at work in Japan, where master potters take on apprentices. Like the apprentice in the 8 of Pentacles, these "deshi" make the same object again and again, learning the perfection of the form. Because they work for the master, if the form is not acceptable, it is destroyed. If it meets the standard, the master signs it. When the apprentice is ready, he or she starts out on his own, and at that point will begin the artistic variations that will make the work truly theirs. But first the form is learned from the inside.
Imagine how it might feel to have someone else sign something that was the work and sweat of your hands. And consider how that form is not only the result of your work, but the training you are given by a teacher. That the form would not exist without that training. This is humility that is also gratitude.
So what is endurance in humility. Well, I can only speak for myself here, as a Westerner who has a great deal of trouble with the system I just outlined above. Because while I understand it, and can respect it. And while I have even attempted it in my studies as an amateur potter and ikebana student in Japan, I am a rebellious American, a New York Jew and thus somewhat, uh, argumentative shall we say? I may take on the role of apprentice, and pledge to myself and a master the discipline of humility. But my endurance in this discipline is weak. Which is perhaps why I've never been a very good gardener either.
What is your relationship to apprenticeship and humility?
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