Sarah Matzar isn’t like other acid cooks. For starters, she is a woman, which—besides Melissa Cargill and Rhoney Stanley of Owsley’s lab and scattered others in the UK—is rare in LSD chemistry circles. Sarah is 4’10” and possesses a lacerating wit. She is starting her own textile business and getting her master’s in anthropology at UC Berkeley, studying Mayan art. She is not here to save the world.

“Do I believe in LSD? Yes, I do,” she says, “but it’s not for everybody.” She is doing this for her family, lowercase. She is doing this to send money back to Guatemala, where she belongs. She’d spent part of her childhood in the States and part in Central and South America, where her mother is from. “Sometimes where you’re born isn’t where you’re from,” she notes.

“Art is my God,” she says, and her God manifests in the form of intricate Guatemalan quilt making, symbols and systems colliding. “My Guatemalan color sense combined with my psychedelic color sense,” she says. In her quilting she attempts to “break out of the block,” the traditional division in pattern making, and does so, the fabrics continuing their conversation across rippled quilted surfaces.