Reading the news, I occasionally marvel at how two highly dissimilar headlines appear next to one another on the digital front page of, say, The New York Times. Here’s an example from 2 weeks ago:

Desperation Mounts as Thousands in India Endure 10 Days Without Power. Horrible heat waves had swept over parts of that country, temperatures at times exceeding 120 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 49 degrees Centigrade), and most people lacked fans, air-conditioning, and even had trouble obtaining clean water to drink and cool down.

Next to it was this headline: Mark Zuckerberg Buys an Irish Castle. The article named several other properties he owned, and added: “Archival information says it can take ‘a brisk walk of 4½ minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen.’” Who designed that house, I wondered.

I took Aussie back to the Montague Farm today, where the Zen Peacemakers tried to establish its headquarters and failed. I’ve been coming to the Farm and into the woods above it for some 24 years. I calculate that I’ve taken 5 dogs there; only Aussie is still with me.

There used to be a lot more water in the pools deep inside the woods that fed into Spaulding Brook that parallels the Robert Frost Trail before joining the Sawmill River, which in turn joins the Connecticut River which then joins the ocean. Ducks once swam on the surface. But today Aussie jumped into a muddy swamp. Trees have crashed down, limbs have fallen, and I have had to carve out new paths, often veering off and finding myself far from my intended destination.

At the same time, the leaves still yearn for light, the tall trees hogging that rare commodity in the dim forest. Saplings cannot compete with their tall, old mothers, and remain small. I guess the trees, too, have their billionaire class along with the struggling, impoverished caste, only their currency is sunlight.

Bernie used to shake his head. “I should never have tried to build the Zen Peacemakers headquarters here,” he’d say. “Our headquarters are in the streets, period.” Not a monastery, not some Zen empire, not even a big office. After we let it go, the office was in our home with desks, telephones, and conference calls. No Zoom at the time.

But when we were at the Farm, as we called it, he had big ideas. He couldn’t help it; his mind was always giving birth to greater complexity and diversity; call it his form of greed. Not an Irish castle owned by one family, but a space to accommodate a bigger and more varied audience. Always engage with more and more people, more and more life.  He had lavish plans, with blueprints for serpentine walkways and arches of fruit trees, for shrines and altars representing different religious traditions, for venues for sacred arts, and even a small amphitheater for plays and concerts.

“The Zen Peacemaker Order is for climate and social activists, but we need an order of minstrels,” he’d growl. An order for artists of all kinds, and of course, his favorite, the Order of Disorder, for clowns.

It’s easy, in our cynical age, to evoke someone’s dream and show how it didn’t materialize, to point at a legacy and see only what it lacked. So I was taken aback today when, after walking up that familiar hill towards the woods, I turned around and realized that some of that dream had indeed come true.

The Farm is now owned by a small consortium of people who offer it as a wedding venue from May through October. It also serves local dances, concerts, and workshops, but it’s weddings that make it financially viable. It’s weddings that prevent the new owners from losing money, much as we did (Bernie wouldn’t consider using the Farm in that way).

And with the aid of a full-time caretaker with a good budget and the right utility vehicles, including plows, tractors, and farm trucks, they created mini-mazes, circular paths, and clearings to showcase the large Paleozoic rocks that dot the ground.

I looked around me and thought: Here it is. It’s not exactly what he wanted, it lacks the religious and sacred arts icons, no amphitheater, but here it is. Serving the present moment and who knows what else in the future, serving the new couples walking down the arch of trees.

It wasn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff, as some thought it was back then, here it is. And if it doesn’t quite serve the purpose he dreamed of, nature has its mysterious ways of fulfilling dreams even after the dreamer has died, as if saying: The world keeps on going. You may be dead, but the world keeps on according to some mysterious arc you can’t follow.

I talked to a friend on Saturday, who described meditating outdoors on her farm and watching a spider weave a web between the rungs of an Adirondack chair, or ants emerging from their mound to go about their business. “Strange,” she said, “how those little things make life feel so big.”

There is solace to be found there. You realize that all your plans and dreams are not too different from the spider web that Aussie tears through as she races an escaping chipmunk. Those are the webs of our lives, so delicate, so gossamer in the big view of things. We can and do mourn the smallness of our triumphs, the vulnerabilities of baby rabbits hiding for dear life among rhododendron bushes and the dried-out pools that once hosted flocks of ducks. But the smaller we feel, the bigger and more impersonal the other feels, and I bow down in reverence.

Who cares when there’s a death or a loss, and the world barely thanks you before continuing on its merry way? You did your bit, your personal smidgeon of energy and effort, you lived and you died and others live and then they die, too, and in some funny way we’re all still going on.

It will go on after this human being no longer shows up with dogs at the Farm and the woods behind it. This human being has requested permission of two new sets of “owners” to walk up the Farm path and into the woods, and they have generously acquiesced. One set of owners talks of how they “monetize” the place. That’s the word of the year, I think, of the past 5 years. People even talk of monetizing the Dharma.

I don’t worry about it. The spiders don’t worry about it; I’m not even sure they worry about their webs being torn up. Aussie, lying on the back steps to guard against lions and tigers, doesn’t seem to worry about it. And if you wonder about grand dreams and illusions, I think of what my friend, Roshi Ken Byalin, recently wrote in his blog: “Peacemaking … is not a matter of grand gestures. It is a painstaking process, reconnecting nodes in the net.”

We do what we can in our lifetimes, a Bernie did in his, and years afterwards someone walks where he once walked and marvels at what transpired even in the face of what then seemed like failure. Not one of the new owners knows that what they are building there was once the dream of someone no longer here, who’d walk up the hill smoking his cigar, dreaming, always dreaming.