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Linking the Ancestral Chain: Integrating Tonawari Toad Medicine
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in an indigenous tonawari ceremony, also known as bufo alvarius, 5-me0-DMT or toad. I sought this medicine because I wanted to mark a shift in my life as I move out of New York City after 12 years and enter a period where I will have no permanent home for an undetermined amount of time. I’m 30, I have very few physical assets, I’m carrying debt, and I’m quadrupling down on making things people don’t currently pay me for. I wanted to remind myself why I am choosing this magical, terrifying spaciousness over certainty. To carry that intention firmly into the unknown ahead and hold it above my head as the inevitable existential tides roll in and out. To make prayers of faith in the seeds I’ve planted and am waiting to bloom.
And the medicine gave me just that reassurance, but as a by-product of a gift far greater than I could have requested. It gave me a new understanding of what Mary Oliver calls “your place in the family of things.”
Tonawari is a medicine secreted from hormonal glands embedded in the back of the Sonoran Desert toad. The liquid is collected during a brief two week mating season, spread thin on a flat stone, dried, and broken into small, smokable crystals. The first thing I said upon coming back to my body after smoking it: “I can’t believe this…
