Intention-to-embodiment distance is the headline measure of the supply side of faithful embodiment — a property of the ecology, never a personal “embodiment score”:
How difficult is it for a viable participant to move from I can perceive something worth making to I can actually test it in material reality?
Around it sit the other conditions worth watching: access to tools and practice environments, time from idea to first prototype, cost of experimentation, number of apprenticeship pathways, availability of corrective feedback, and ease of reentry after a failed attempt. The distinction that keeps the measure honest is between distance the ecology imposes — cost, gatekeeping, missing access to matter — and the distance that is reality: matter pushing back, skill taking time. A healthy ecology works to shorten the first without pretending it can remove the second, because that resistance is not the obstacle to embodiment but what embodiment is made of. It is the embodiment counterpart to releasing trapped capacity.