Day 170: "Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain." (Anonymous)

Today was one of those days where I felt like I had been spinning around in a circle, and then came to a sudden, dizzying halt, while everything else kept whirling around me and I tried frantically to regain my balance and breath.

I am a big believer in rain as a purifier, as a rejuvenator. So when it started to lightly rain on my walk from work to the metro, I let it hit me. I left my umbrella in the bag and soaked it up. I enjoyed a walk in the rain.

By the time I got to just across from the metro, it was coming down so hard it appeared to be raining up from the road. I had fears that maybe my two white shirts would be the same as one white shirt and I'd be arrested for indecent exposure. (I wasn't, the two white shirts were equal to one dark shirt.)

Caught up in my act of spontaneity, I didn't consider having to wear wet clothes on the ACed metro, or what I would look like when my very non-waterproof mascara started to melt.

And I didn't care. I saw this just beyond the airport, over the river, and it's all I needed:
(Not my picture, taken from Flickr. I saw them from a different angle, thicker, closer up. Stunning.)

It reminds me of the last double rainbow I saw, almost exactly three years ago, in England:

And the really cool part is, that Mom saw the Washington rainbow on the national news, around the same time I saw it in real life.

"The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched."
-Henry David Thoreau