Don’t Worry by Mary Oliver

Don’t Worry
by Mary Oliver

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

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This sweet, sweet poem feels like it’s about ripening. The opening sentence is so simple, and yet so clear. For anyone who still hasn’t quite arrived, including myself in moments, or part of things that are slow moving and complex and attuned to deep time, I find it so very reassuring. There’s such a patience implicit in this. This sent me, of course, down a rabbit hole of who the heck is St. Augustine? Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was, by his own account in the Confessions, a young man of long detours — Manichaean, rhetorician, common-law husband, restless, unwilling to commit, famously praying “grant me chastity, but not yet.” He was, in short, a man and a saint of many detours. It reminds me of Jung, who said, “The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.”