From the OT lesson for Friday in the week after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 5
12 Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.
13 For six days you shall labor and do all your work.
14 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.

I usually take Friday as my day away from the office, my “day of rest.” However, this week I “stayed home” yesterday and later in the day posted this summary of the day to my Facebook page: “This has been a productive, if somewhat expensive, alternative day off. I took today rather than tomorrow because [a] I have a wedding rehearsal tomorrow and [b] I was able to schedule some much needed auto maintenance today. Auto maintenance was the first accomplishment – new right front lower ball joint ($600, also the expensive part of the day). Mowed the lawn, whole thing, and cut two huge low-hanging branches off the thorny-something-or-other in the back garden that have made mowing a pain (in reality – the thing has 1-1/2″ long needle sharp spines!) Did three loads of laundry (one a big load of black shirts so I have uniforms for rehearsal, wedding, and Sunday). Made a big batch of ‘copper penny salad’ for church choir end-of-program-year picnic this evening. Hard boiled a dozen eggs and put them to pickle in a mixed brine saved from three sources: Lebanese pickled turnips, Palestinian pickled baby eggplants, and home pickled ramps and garlic. In a week or two I will be able to report on the success of said pickling of eggs. – It was also a day of memories of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land, set off by a lunch of pickled turnips, pickled eggplants, and toasted pita (spread with labneh and sprinkled with za’atar). – And I realized while driving home from the auto shop that it’s been ages since I wrote any poetry and also realized that it’s been about the same period of time that I stopped carrying an actual paper notebook to record random thoughts. My ‘mobile device’ just doesn’t function in the same way for that purpose…. loss of paper = loss of poetry. Going back to paper.”

Not only have I lost my poetry, I seem to have lost sabbath. I think the two are related.