After all, in making heart, you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you care most about. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines or schedules, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over achievements of others, indeed, anything that keeps us from giving our work our best shot. What separates heartists from ex-heartists is that those who challenge their fears continue, those who don't quit. Each step in the heart-making process puts that issue to the test. But not art.
Art is exquisitely responsive.
Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art. And if you hear again, without my pounding you with it, nowhere is feedback so absolute as in zazen, as in the making of heart, as in that one thing. The work we make, even if unnoticed and undesired by the world, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction to what we do. The breathtakingly wonderful thing about this reaction is its truthfulness.