1. holy sponges

wringing out what is not yours

standing desk altar

I have the pleasure of working on a podcast hosted by Rebecca Auman, who is both a talented witch and a wonderful person. At the start of the year, Rebecca gave me a tarot reading. At one point during the reading, when I was asking how to find more balance in my life, she searched for a metaphor to describe what she was intuiting and said, “You are a sea sponge.” Her point was that I often take in too much.

When Rebecca told me that I was like a sea sponge, I had to stop her so I could look up what exactly that was. For most of my life I’ve used a basic washcloth in the shower, with the exception of a rebellious teenage stint involving those pink plastic mesh loofahs that fester with bacteria. I had never paid much attention to the sponges you might see in a spa, the porous, fluffy, yellow masses that often come with a loop of twine as a handle.

And I had somehow gotten this far in my life without knowing that these sea sponges are actually from the sea, unlike the blue squares you might use to clean your dishes. Was this common knowledge, that these spa sponges were once living animals?? When did everyone have the “this is where sea sponges come from ” conversation??

Here is what I’ve found: Sea sponges have been around much longer than humans, and they are hypothesized to be the very first animal that evolved into an out-group from the last common ancestor of all animals approximately 600 million years ago. They are about as different from humans as an animal could possibly be: no organs, no nervous system, no digestive system, no spine. As a result, for most of human history, they were considered to be plants, and it wasn’t until 1795 that scientists discovered sponges eat by circulating water through their porous channels to extract food particles that their cells then digest. They are the only animals that, when reduced to their most base cell level, can regenerate back to their previous form.

Long before sea sponges and humans were revealed to be from the same kingdom, humans were putting the sponges to use, and in turn the sponges seeped into our stories. We know the ancient Greeks harvested and cleaned with sea sponges because in The Iliad, Hephaestus, god of artisans and blacksmiths, uses one to clean his face after working on an anvil, and in The Odyssey, the suitors use sponges to clean the Great Hall. And then there’s the sponge, the Holy Sponge, soaked in the sour wine vinegar, that a Roman soldier gives to Jesus before the crucifixion via a lance made from a hyssop plant: John 19:30: “When he had received his drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” The Holy Sponge was once venerated in its entirety in Jerusalem, but over time it fragmented into smaller relics on view in several Roman churches. When you break apart a holy sponge, you still have many holy sponges.

When I learned more about sea sponges, all of them started to feel holy to me.

Rebecca recommended that I obtain an actual sea sponge to put on my altar, which is, I admit, just the far edge of my standing desk. Her instruction was that when I come back home after a day of running around the city, or if I’m feeling stressed about any number of interactions, or if I’ve simply been looking at the barrage of bad news, I should fill the sponge with water, and then make a ritual out of wringing it out. The idea was that I should feel this as a release of bad energy. I should feel what is not mine wash down the drain. For as much water filters into a sea sponge, the same amount of water is released through the pores.

It feels strange to order ritualistic tools off the internet, but I really didn’t know where in Brooklyn I would find a sea sponge, so I had to settle for a listing on an artisan site that was in all likelihood a drop shipper. When the sea sponge arrived and I pulled it out of its mesh carrier bag, I was not expecting the yellow mass to be so brittle, like the honeycomb candy that’s just sugar and air. I gently pressed my fingers into the holes, some off which ran all the way through.

With water, the sponge relinquished its shape. It turned soft and fragile, easy to tear. Mine came in a pack of two—with a bonus pink salt crystal—so I chose one as a symbolic sponge, to go on the desk, and the other as a practical sponge, to use in the shower.

So allow me, for a moment, to sing the praises of the sea sponge: it is soft yet exfoliating, with a beautiful lather. Compared to the humble washcloth, it is a revolutionary decadence. It has an incredible capacity to hold water and soap, it’s hypoallergenic, and it has biologically active enzymes that fight bacterial growth and mildew. When I wring out its water, I do feel the stress I am carrying spill through the pores and wash down the drain.

Every time I use it, or fidget with the sponge on my desk, I think about how strange it is to spend time with this being, technically an animal, but as different as can be from my human animal body. Sea sponges don’t have memories, or consciousness, by the human definition, but these sea sponges have lived a long life before they reached me. Somewhere on the bottom of the ocean—if the sea sponges I own were harvested ethically, and were not entirely ripped out of the rocks—the remaining cells have regenerated, spawning new sponges. I have always believed that if / when we discover life on other planets, the aliens will not appear to us as green men, or any other kind of being we will immediately recognize as living. I imagine our first contact will be more like holding a sponge, filling it with water, squishing it in our hands, expanding our definitions of what is living after all.

The first month of 2025, I constantly felt that I was soaking up too much. For the whole last week of January my head was knotted in tension, I was frequently nauseated—some sort of migraine brought on by a miasma of political and personal upheaval. On some level I desire to turn away from it all, to restrict my consumption, to dissociate completely, only to feel myself pulled in again by the chaos and shock of the news cycle. For so much of my life I have understood my porosity as a weakness; I assumed the only solution would be to toughen the edges. How can I possibly write about decadence right now? How can I possibly pay attention to sponges?

Because sea sponges release just as much as they take in. They survive because of the way they cycle water in and out, catching the plankton they need to nourish their cells. Everything they soak up must be let go. It is this constant movement that allows them to flourish, and even to regenerate when they are hacked down. All that comes in must be released; all of life is stranger than we know. All metaphors these days are rough and untidy, but this one I am carrying into this year.

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In 2025, I am writing this monthly column about small and strange luxuries. If you have a shoestring decadence you would like to share, please write me: saramccrea [at] gmail [dot] com.