My Queer Pride Flag

So, I ask you this: What good is personalised Tumblr-esque queer pride flag without a proper infodump that only the most ardent acolytes mine could possibly brother to read!!~ :nko_giggle:

So, I feel like the alt-text I provided for this image is a good start so here goes: A queer pride style flag image, with 4 horizontal bars, from top to bottom, purple, black, green, brown. The colours work nicely together, they have been adjusted by someone with a keen eye and a deft touch. Superimposed on the bars is an encircled pentagram in yellow.

So, “what does it all mean?”I hear you ask dear reader.

Well, the Purple is inspired by the sunset/sunrise, you don’t always see strong purple tones but when you do it’s magnificent. Sunset/rise is really the most powerful symbol of liminal spaces that I can think of, it’s between night and day and so obviously so to all animals and even plants and fungi. Liminality fascinates me, boundaries, thresholds etc. A door is neither wholly inside nor outside, and I think a lot of fascinating and important living happens in these spaces, both psychological and physical, and perhaps the most critical events in one's life are themselves a deep change, from one state to another.

The Black represents the Night, the opportunities one has when the sky is no longer dominated by the Sun and we can see the stars. The night is of course dark and can be scary, but it is also calm, a good time to rest.I think it’s especially important in these times that we face the darkness we see in our world, from genocides and other mass attrocities all the way down to micro aggressions that are part of systemic injustices that are less obvious (at least to those without privilege). We can’t spend all our time dwelling on these things, nor should we be inn eternal night, but we should not hide away either. As the day is balanced by the night, so should our focus on darkness inside and out be balanced with our duty to face it, and our capacity to do so.

The Green is the colour of plants, and represents Growth in all it’s forms. Nothing in this world is truly static, certainly not life as we know it, nor is a rock, nor a star, nor even is a singular atom. Growth happens when energy goes from being spread out, e.g. in the form of sunlight and nutrients in soil, and it all gets drawn into an entity forming trunks and branches and leaves and flowers. And yet more beings rearrange this energy into other forms, such as a bee taking pollen to make honey and so on. This is fundamentally what entropy is, and while I think that word gets poorly explained, I hope it comes across that while entropy (or disorganisation of aforementioned energy) does go up when you consider the whole universe, where life is concerned the entropy locally goes down, at least temporarily, and that is marvelous to me. Everything is in flux, in motion from where it began to where it is going, and that is real power if you ask me.

The Brown is the Earth, She who quite literally grounds us (excluding those in aircraft or space, but those people notice the lack of grounding I am quite sure.) I invoke this when I want to be more aware of my sense of Place, be it my place in the world, other’s place, physically or psychologically. If I am in a place which is foreign to me, it’s very useful for me to be able to remember that I have been in many unfamiliar headspace, locales and so on and have muddled my way through ok for the most part. I truly think Where you are is just as worthy a question as Who or What you are.

And finally, the pentagram has a lot of layers, but honestly a lot of why it’s there is largely aesthetic. Of course it evokes the idea of witchcraft and I do enjoy that association, but most importantly it’s the geometry of the thing that fascinates me, especially when encircled as it is here. The fact that all you need to draw a perfect (within reason of course) geometric pentacle or pentagon is a compass and a straightedge is just absolutely sublime to me for some reason. Should you play with a compass and straightedge you will find it easy to make 1, 2 3 and 6 fold symmetry, but it takes a real leap of either intuition or a depth of understanding how 2d geometry works to create an image with 5 fold symmetry.

So there you have it, a few hundred words and a little curated look into my soul. If you made it this far first of all, thank you, I appreciate it greatly, and I’d love to talk more about itn if you have questions, or have your own special symbols/colours/whatever that you’ve put thought and energy into