 I'm sorry for breathing. I'm sorry if my darting eyes make you uncomfortable. That was a sneeze. I don't have COVID or at least I don't think I do. I'm sorry for sneezing. I'm sorry for being near you, passing you on your hike, darting past avoid eye contact, hold breath. I'm sorry for breathing. I'm sorry I don't have the answers for you. I'm sorry if my existence threatens you, repulses you, angers you, incites you into rage, into violence. Blame me. I'm used to it. You look at me as if I am a disease. I am not a disease, and yet I do have a sickness. What is your sickness? What is the root of your shame? It's my parents. I'm sorry for not staying in touch for creating distance. I want to make you proud for the truth is it's been a hard pandemic. And I'm still figuring my shit out. I'm sorry for my changing needs, desires, identities and career paths that you question. I'm sorry for being queer. But I am who I am, and I love who I love. May you learn to accept this. I'm sorry, but sorry for feeling so much. For the pain you don't want to feel. For the part in me that exists within you too. For the withheld love and the words left unspoken. For this language barrier and how everything is fine until it isn't. I'm sorry, but I can't remember my childhood or you in it. I think you were too busy working and I asked myself would I rather have a present father in my life or a paid college tuition? Truth is all I really wanted was more than 15 minutes of your undivided attention. I'm sorry I disappointed you when I left the family business. But I had to follow my own path and find out who I am outside of filial piety and obligation. I'm sorry, but I can't stay silent anymore to all of this bullshit. Just because we have financial security doesn't mean we are protected. Sorry for saying fuck white supremacy and going after protests. I know you fear for my safety. But our people are being attacked, stabbed, robbed, and beaten to death. And we all have a say in this. I'm sorry for hiding my life from you. I'm sorry, but I have this story that you'll never understand what I'm going through. Sorry for rocking this boat, but I do want to make this narrative different because I actually don't want this distance. And I'm sorry if I say I too much instead of us. But I do care about you. I do, even when I don't say it. So thank you. Thank you for coming all the way to America. Two suitcases in hand left the motherland, starting over on foreign soil, endless toil to create the conditions for my privilege, safety, and survival. Thank you for honoring your own parents and their expectations while learning to accept us for our generational differences. It must have been hard for you too. And I'm proud of you. And I hope you are proud of me too. You did the best you could with what you knew. What is your sickness? I'm sorry for all the ways that I am so hard on myself for the self-doubt and self-betrayal, for the years of assimilation, whitewashing just to fit in, throwing away my Chinese snacks at the school cafeteria, to all the relationships I left before it got too deep because I was too afraid to state my needs. For all the ways I overcompensate and overachieve to my body, sorry for the times I've neglected, ignored, denied, starved, and left you, allowed to be objectified, sexualized, invisibilized because that was all I knew too. Trying to fit into this made-up box, this toxic myth that perpetuates the shame that we are not enough, I know now it is not our fault. You are not to fault. We are not to fault. What is the pride of your existence? My name is Tiflin Ling Yuxuan. I was born in Taiwan, the co-created magic dragon of Taiwanese immigrants. My ancestry comes from Fuzhou, China. And I am proud to be Taiwanese-American. May we remember that within justice, equity, and liberation lies forgiveness, your body, your participation, your arrival. You belong. You belong. You belong. We belong. Greetings, the future. Hello to the many peoples that we sincerely hope are opening this time capsule, 10,000 old Earth years from now. We, the current peoples of planet, are burying this time capsule to mark the passing of 100 old Earth years since we arrived on this planet, now planet. In this time, much has changed. It has been a busy 100 OEYs of co-evolving, translating, and negotiating. We are so excited to imagine you, the future. When we first started to co-evolve, back on the Thoreau Magnum XL, our decisions were small and often unintentional. We spoke, we exchanged, we changed. We came to be something other than what we had been. We began to move, to build out, to spread hyphy, to connect. We began making agreements and systems. As a council, we negotiated the community agreements. We were aiming not just for good, but for great, for awesome. And now we are Planet, this complex and intricate and beautiful, and still a little janky around the edges, system, planet, life. We think that it is truly awesome. We were going for, wild with life, everything talking to each other all the time, networks and clusters and fruiting bodies, no one in charge of anyone else, a life in motion. We hope very much that you, the future, have inherited something that you think is awesome. Although much will, we know, have changed by the time you open this, since change is our whole deal and our greatest commitment. This is who we are and we are so excited to imagine, meet you, the future. We are also deeply excited to share with you the contents of Planet's first time capsule. First you will find a candle, tincture and lozange. These items are gifts from us, the blackberries, our resident discerners of the decomp. The tincture is a representation of the past. It is a gentle reminder of where we began. Taste it and you'll taste us. Yum! The lozange represents the present. Melt the lozange in hot water and inhale deeply. This will clear your mind and bring your attention to the current moment, the candle. Represents your future. By lighting it, you were holding space for all the possibilities for the future of Planet. By tasting the tincture, inhaling the scent of the lozange and lighting the candle, you were breaking down the temporal hierarchy and inviting us to party with you, the future. You will also find a commemorative scroll of the original community agreements. Wow, we bet these look different from yours, huh? These agreements are always changing and up for negotiation. We can't wait to see how things have evolved. We believe in change. We change together and we change alone. All participate in consensual growth and change in a process of co-evolution and community. Our communication is abundant. We communicate in frequencies, vibrations, ways. We embrace translation, transparency, transcommunication. We reject centralized information. We commit to non-hierarchy. Everything has a voice, even if you can't hear it. Everything is a something. Every something is a somebody. Somebody's deserve care and consideration. Original strings for the braiding of the species. As the old instructions go, each string represents a species that was a part of this original agreement. And by weaving these strings together, we are showing our individuality and our togetherness. It's a visual metaphor for the way we roll. Okay, so this one is a little unorthodox, but we found this feather. It obviously belongs to an angel. The cicadas reported the sighting, but haven't seen the angel since. Hopefully, by the time you're reading this, said angel has been welcomed into the collective. If so, will you return their feather to them? We think they would like it back. Scrapbook, beautifully put together and labeled by Gina the cicada, a master archivist with celebrated penmanship. You will find the captain's log on the Thoreau Magnum XL. Day 132 of TMXL mission in transit. All peaceful aboard the Thoreau Magnum XL. Most of the fleet has successfully entered cryo, life support and biofuel cells functioning optimally. Despite previous apprehensions, we have adjusted well to the mushroom diet. A working draft of an important letter to the editor of Colony Chatroom Quarterly. We write you as representatives of the nascent interbeing council of the planet to fill you in on some exciting plans and visions and to lay before you the possibility of involvement in our organization and evolution to infinity and beyond. One of the only extant sections of the original mushroom lore. Pregnance from the great mycelial consciousness. One, there is no such thing as complete emptiness. Every planet has a blur. We are alone and can't swap to both. Only love and death change all things. We never change. We grow. The phone number to the deities. So you can hear Matua tell the story of planet in his own words, fun. Well, I come from this place where balance was always the holding thread to existence. Nana, my mother, your universal love force fell on the positive side of this balance. She also fell in love with Holocoon, and they created me, Matua. We've also included this mad, cute map so you can see what the planet was then and compare it to the planet you know and you're now. What's changed? We love you and wish you well, the past. My great-grandmother gardened. I remember her smell vividly, like sun drenched citrus and warm earth and fall. In my mind's kaleidoscope, I can recall brief, sunny flashes of her home or what once was her home in the garden that once was hers. Blackberry vines reaching tirelessly for the sun, a fenced-in garden of humble means, rose and lovingly carved rose of cucumber, tomato and greens. My grandmother had citrus trees in the backyard that once was hers, customs spliced with different fruits, somehow convinced to coexist from the same system of roots. Actually, a rather violent process for a tree to carve a notch deep into its trunk, exposing palpitating pulp and binding in a severed branch from another not too dissimilar else the new limb be rejected. My mother taught me to garden, but it didn't last for long. The gardener, am I learning in its ways? One year, our dog, or what once was our dog, buried an apricot pit in what once was our backyard. It grew steadily, eventually bore fruit. My mother retrieved my great-grandmother's recipes for preserves and apricot leather, and we plotted and dreamed together of fruity delights until the gardeners pruned the tree and took all the fruits beyond our sights. I don't begrudge them this bounty, but the tree she never recovered or bore fruit again. My great-grandmother was Choctaw, but she wasn't raised with her tribe. In order to be given back land that once was their home, but to become Oklahoma around them, my great-grandmother's mother had to surrender all but her youngest to be raised on a convent. My great-grandmother became a branch rip from her trunk and violently coerced into growing with foreign fruit. Her mother couldn't afford much else. For Christmas, she was allowed to send a basket of sweet oranges. The nuns would keep and eat them all, my great-grandmother said. I cannot pinpoint where and when my family became Mormon. I haven't looked hard enough, I'm sure, because when you're very young and you see them all, your great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all dutifully dressing for Sunday service. You assume it's always been this way and how it will always be. I never liked white button front shirts or pressed itchy woolen slacks, but my mother smelled of lilacs and her beautiful knee-length dresses, and I learned to the subtle pageantry of neckties while I covered it her draped patterned knits. My grandmother was sick all my life, or at least all of it I can remember. She wasn't in a wheelchair at first, but she was until the last. Most of our relationship was spent sequestered away from the rest of the noise of cousins and kin playing boisterously. We'd snuggle together in her quilts, intricately beating crystal necklaces or watching impressionless daytime television. My grandmother wore pants to church. Skirts can be wrapped in the wheels of a chair. I'd keep our crystal necklaces as bookmarks on my Book of Mormon or wrapped like a bracelet under my cuffs. I'd say I knew I was different, but no one is born knowing that. They're taut. I was caught by their glances and whispers, sometimes not so quietly, and the delicate dance of their body language. The thought was embedded into me with a steady, silent, violent incision that something in me did not fit the tree from which I had grown. My mother took pictures and videos of me doing a butterfly dance, wearing oversized shirts like a dress. I'd grow into them, my parents would stress, using baby blankets as billowing wings and twirling in the sunlit living room to the twinkling tones of ivory keys on my mom's antique piano. For creatures with so much organically shared, we differ in so many ways. I'd say I knew I was different, but different from whom. Community isn't comparative, it's relative. We call those with whom we are linked by genetic chance and parental choice, our relatives, and they become our standard against which we judge ourselves. I overheard my mother rebelling in confidence to someone that people at church had whispered and stared at my grandmother wearing pants. Women aren't supposed to wear pants, the church said in some texts somewhere. My grandmother was chronically ill, but as is shown in the Bible, and in Joseph Smith's fruitful sequel, spliced into the methodology of the prior, Christ's heavenly father loves suffering and bends his rules only for men. My grandmother wore pants, and for that she should be sore ashamed. Apologize and change her ways, because fabric only honors God when shaped genital accordingly. My family is a history of mental illness, but ever so rarely has that been named. You see, naming a thing dictates its fate. There is in the Mormon church a belief that you belong to one of the tribes of Israel. And amongst these tribes, there's an unspoken hierarchy. I don't rightly know and don't really care what that imagined hierarchy is, but I remember once my mother said that when she was spliced into my father's family, they bristled at the thought of her tribe melding meaningfully into theirs. She took my father's family name, and not long after they named me, in fact, Simile of my father. When I was born, we left Utah's peaks and followed the path past ancestor pioneers to the coast. My mother was raised by the sound of the waves crashing on the California shores. My family cautioned without Mormon peers, our future would be unsure. That's one trick of the Mormon church. It seems today, wherever you seek, a branch is not far to be found. Church continues to break new ground and pour its foundations across the globe. Their ultimate goal is to fully enrobe the earth's population in their indoctrination. I often wonder who I'd have been if we hadn't stopped fortune in the Golden State. A song says the cracks where the light gets in, but the Mormon church would argue that sin. I don't know how to explain to someone how to uproot themselves from a cult, because though I stumbled my way out and shrouded in trauma and shame, it is a path I cannot name. Part accident, part fumbling, directions hidden in mumbling, no one clear map, no skeleton key, no 12-meant steps until you're free. It's something you carry and even transmit, a trauma that sticks this deep. Science says we're forced to encode our pain into our genealogy. How much of the decision to leave was a decision at all, I wonder. After the fact, I can trace a line from misstep to misstep to blunder that opened the door for me to seek more, why was I seeking at all? In college, I found myself by strange necessity in Oklahoma, and as we drove to the school for my first day, a sign said chalk-top pointing away. I had a professor who gave us a mask that was said to erase your face. In place of the stories, my visit would scream, my body's language would take their place. I don't know now why I was so shocked to hear my classmates finally name that upon observation, my movement would veer between hypermasculine and hyperfeminine, but somehow then it was startling to hear. Well, not startling, but jarring, like taking a scoop un-glove to fresh fallen snow. Something inside me whispered, sometimes not silently, that I'd been growing tenuously attached to a tree that wanted a fruit I could not bring to fruition. In some translations of the Bible, it says that all things have their time and their season, and this was mine. I find my transness is not actually a discovery of something unknown. A professor once told me as we studied the Bible that our mistranslations have mischaracterized the work of God and Genesis. The universe was entropy before the book began, and God came in and organized the seasons that would foster man. There's a constant steady pull between order and chaos, he said, and neither is more natural, they feed each other full. The world was just a garden once before man began to build their towers towards the sky, and God, it seems made very clear that we should never try to build our way past what can stand steadily on its own. He scattered them across the globe and made it so never again could we fully understand each other. I never meant to be a nomad. I either did my great-grandmother. It was not really our choice to stay in what was once our home. What once was sacred queerness has too often become today a dandelion seed destined to float, often with futility in search of soil in an increasingly paved planet. During the time of COVID, my queer sibling came to live with me. Behind the apartment in which I once lived, there was an unkempt garden space. We weeded that space for days, bought flowers for the boxes, carved away earth to reset its own steps, and organized, as best we could, our one safe escape from inside our four walls. My sibling eventually moved away, and soon with my partner and I, seeking a place we could call home, forced by the greed of corporate landlords and the systems that continued to deprive so many human beings of shelter in which to set roots. When the last room was packed, we peeked out the back window into what was once a garden. Somehow, sometime during the days, an invasive weed from a neighbor's ground had crept its way under the fence. And now what once was a wood patio and two picnic tables and four flower boxes and one carefully placed stone step path was only weeds, hungry and vast, as tall as your knee or higher, everywhere, everywhere, prickling green, full grown, full blown so fast. I laughed because I could not cry at how without daily careful pruning, everything was swallowed by a plant that likely never was meant to grow in this place's soil. What a full and beautiful day of building forward under the theme of advocacy and artistry. Thank you so much community. I'm here with my co-host, Yiyo Ornelas. What are you good to say? What are some impressions of the day? I feel so grateful and so impacted by all the thoughts that were shared, the art that was shared. I am really, really impacted and I am just so happy and I wanna share some of the thoughts that I've had, you know. I'm just like thinking about how through these art shares, through these panels, we were gifted actionable items that we can each do to make our theater community much more inclusive. What are the works that we need to do? What are the reflections we need to take in? And where is it that we have to set aside? Where is it that we need to step up? And we all have our own work to do and it's through these art shares and through these panel discussions that we can start to grow as a community. So I'm very, very, very grateful to have experienced today's events and today's journey. Yeah, so many things, so many quotes. I mean, stop asking people to consult on their own performance, you know, from Chris in our trans advocacy collective. Passing is a social construct that needs to die. Thank you, Nikki Martinez. You know, it's much more difficult to dismiss someone when someone else is standing up for them. Thank you, Karen, Becky. You know, language and verbiage matters. Thank you, Kenyon. No language is dead. Every language has a spirit. Thank you, Ieche. I mean, just on and on. Such beautiful art shares. Please join us tomorrow at 10 a.m. PT, one p.m. Eastern and all the ways in between and globally that you are joining us on Crowdcast. Thank you, Crowdcast registrants. We love you, community. Oh my God, my heart is so full. And Crowdcast on the Fool's Fury Facebook page on HowlAround. And please, if you like what we're doing, if this aligns with your values, please consider donating below. We are paying 47 people to make this happen and it's taken months to put together. As you can see, it's just such a high quality of work and community. So please put your dollars where your values are and help us out if you haven't already. Anything else, my friend? What do you think, Kiyo? I think that I'm excited for tomorrow's art shares. If today was day one, I am definitely looking forward to day two and I can't wait. Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much, everyone. We'll build forward with you tomorrow. Let's dance it out, people. Woo!