TL;DR: I've done a lot of things in my life—from sales to A/V installation to office management to software engineering—but learning about and cultivating psycho- and bio-active plants, extracting, preparing, and administering their active components, and documenting and sharing the knowledge acquired in the process is more satisfying and fulfilling than I ever could have imagined.

I was raised a fundamentalist evangelical Christian in central Texas in the 80s and 90s. After high school I went to a bible college to become a missionary. While there, I fell in love with linguistics and my life trajectory narrowed to a subtype of missionary known as a Bible translator.

Fast forward a few years and after several years of intensive study of the Bible, both in English translations as well as in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, I reached a breaking point where my faith could no longer bear the textual inconsistencies and contradictions or the irrational dogmatism of the particular brand of Christianity I belonged to. I dropped out of the program mid-way through my senior year.

After my falling out with Christianity and eventual acceptance of an atheistic-agnostic materialist worldview, I started to attempt to re-envision the path my life would now take. This was a slow process that involved a lot of shitty, entry-level jobs, a few amazing seasonal jobs in Alaska, a brief stint as a small business owner, and a good bit of travel. I eventually went back and finished a BA in Classical Languages from GVSU (a state school in Michigan), got an MA in Linguistics from U Montana, and spent a year and a half in a PhD Linguistics program at UC Santa Barbara before getting burnt out on the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of academia. A couple months after I dropped out of grad school, I began for a coding bootcamp in San Francisco, upon completion of which I began a career in tech working as a full-stack software engineer in data analytics, fintech, and now medtech.

Though my current career in tech is reasonably lucrative and has many great perks like good work-life balance, flexible hours, the option to WFH (even before the pandemic), and unlimited PTO, I just feel like it's still kind of a waste of my energy and time to be spending so much of my life making wealthy people wealthier in exchange for a small fraction of the profits.

But during the pandemic, I started watching the History channel show "Alone", and this got me really excited about outdoor adventures again—a passion that had pretty much remained dormant since my last summer in Alaska in 2015. But what better activity than going out into the wilderness and away from civilization during a pandemic?

This renewed passion for wilderness adventures evolved into an obsession to learn bushcraft and wilderness survival skills, which inevitably lead to learning all I could about edible and medicinal plants, which grew to include tincture-making and essential oil extractions, and eventually I began growing my own plants for tinctures and herbal smoke blends (though I still have to buy in bulk for EO extractions due to the low yields of most plants). As my home chem lab continued to expand, I began looking for more and more challenging herbal extractions and processes: isolating caffeine from coffee beans or myristicin and nutmeg butter from nutmeg, chemical separations, paper and thin-layer chromatography, etc.

And it's been in these last 2 years—and especially the last few months—that I feel like I've finally found that thing that I've been looking for since my faith evaporated back in 2003 and my life trajectory went completely out the window.

And now that I've found this community in particular, I feel like I've finally found my people. Plant/psychedelic/chemistry nerds (or afficionados if "nerd" is not your preferred nomenclature) with the passion to pursue life-altering and mind-opening experiences in direct defiance of a society that seeks to obliterate this ageless and ineffable wisdom and access to the unparalleled experiences it can bring to anyone willing to take those first steps into a great unknown.

I look forward to learning and expanding with you all!

Welcome Chionophile41.

I take it your name has a link to the 'amazing season jobs in Alaska'?

What areas of the forum interest you the most?

Welcome chionophile41! The sacred plants have a thing or two to teach about God and all things spiritual. I have found this path to be very healing in being able to actually grow in understanding in matters I previously I only had predetermined answers.

Hope you enjoy your stay!

Hello and Welcome! It's exciting to hear from a new member with such a diverse and, indeed, relevant skillset.

I've also raised an eyebrow at the differences and inconsistencies between the King James (Church of England/Protestant), and the Douay (Roman Catholic), as well as the German Lutheran, versions of the bible. I'm impressed at your linguistic abilities, especially that you took the trouble to view the source materials for that all-too-frequently misinterpreted "Holy Book".

Nice to hear that you've got a home lab - what sort of capabilities does it have? And have you grown any of your own source materials for your experiments?

Looking forward to hearing more from you.

Hi, chionophile41.

Curious life trajectory, something like a zig zag trip in everywhere. I also like adventure.

Thanks for the welcome and your questions!

The "chionophile" part of my name and the seasonal Alaskan jobs are really only linked in that I'm happiest in colder climates, so going to Alaska for the summer just kind of made sense—especially while I was still in school.

Right now the forum areas I'm most interested in are the teks and related discussions on the theory of extraction and practical applications and experimentation. I'm not a chemist in any sense of the term, but I've always enjoyed learning how to DIY, especially where substances I plan to ingest are involved. And since I built a small lab in the process of learning how to steam distill essential oils, I figure it's time to start branching out and learning more advanced extraction techniques.

Thanks for the welcome!

I'm still working through my views on spirituality. Breaking with fundamentalism resulted in a hard 180 to the opposite extreme of atheistic, deterministic empiricism. And while I still mostly believe that truth/knowledge comes from experiences that are objectively verifiable and reproducible, I'm starting to open up to the idea that there are forces and realities that we just don't fully understand and so have a hard time with the verification and replication aspects.

But I'm looking forward to learning and growing and seeing where this journey takes me!

Thanks for the welcome! I knew I'd likely encounter others who have had their own journeys with that "Holy Book". If you haven't heard of it, there's a new-ish book called "The Immortality Key" that traces the use of psychedelics in Indo-European religion to their use in the Greek mystery of cults of Demeter and Dionysus, and their (very recently discovered) use in certain early Christian house churches. It's a great book for anyone with overlapping interest in psychedelics and religion/Christianity.

So the lab is mostly set up for chemical separations, steam distillation, and other types of heat-based herbal extractions. I've got a few hot plates, a small centrifuge, a dozen or so flasks of various sizes and shapes (round- and flat-bottom, separatory, ehrlenmeyer, biomass, etc), a couple vacuum and water pumps, some scales, lab stands, and various test tubes, clamps, angled joints, condensers, etc. Here's a photo of the setup I used for a ginger extraction pretty early in the lab-building process: https://i.stack.imgur.com/dqCqTl.jpg

I've done a lot of tincturing, about a dozen or so essential oil/hydrosol extractions, a couple caffeine extractions, and one soxhlet extraction (my latest acquisition). I've also done some thin-layer chromatography—mostly testing cannabinoid content of decarboxylated cannabis (some of which I grew).

But so far, the two DMT extractions I've done have been the most rewarding. I used Noman's tek both times, the first time without the recrystallization step, the second one with at least one recrystallization cycle using n-heptane (which is still in-progress). I just got some d-limonene today and am excited to try the Limtek extraction next.

Plant-wise, I've mostly grown catnip, lamb's ear, lavender, geranium, hops, capsicum peppers (jalapeños, cayenne), and cannabis. I've done extractions with everything except the hops because it hasn't produced any strobiles yet.

Howdy, fellow-adventurer!

It has been a pretty wild ride. And sometimes I wish I'd been a little more focused and just gotten really good at one or two things instead of sorta ok at a dozen things. But the journey has made me who I am, and regrets and what-ifs don't change reality, so I'm just accepting my "mile-wide-inch-deep" skillset and just running with it.