The Gospel According to Facebook Marketplace
It began with the decision to cull.
Not the gentle sort of tidying that involves wiping a shelf and stacking your favorites like sacred relics. No, this was a reckoning. A full-scale bibliocide. A soul-level Book Potlatch.
We hauled boxes—hundreds of books—from my office to the tables under the great oak tree. My husband used the tractor. I used my back, my knees, and a solemn vow to keep only what truly sang. My psyche needs space. Be ruthless!
I’ve done this before. Once, long ago, when we moved north and I fancied a more monastic life. I gave books away by the dozen, thinking myself evolved, or integrated, or too lazy to pack and haul books. Then we moved back, and the shelves mourned their lost friends. One click Amazon and local used bookstores are dangerous. So this time, I curated more carefully: one box for gifts, one for the local Library, and a few sacred stacks to be passed, like communion, into the hands of kindred spirits. Why did I feel a bit like mamma-bird letting her fledglings fly?
The rest? Offered to the village.
I posted the Book Potlatch on local community pages. Free for the taking.
What ensued could only be described as Facebook Market Mayhem.
Within minutes, I was deluged with direct messages that read like a Jungian Rorschach test of rural bibliophilia:
Do you have any James Joyce?
Can I make an appointment to browse?
Where are you located? I don’t drive.
Can you send me a picture of all the psychology books?
One woman, very serious, very prompt, wanted all the parenting books, even though, she confessed, her children were grown. “But I still haven’t recovered,” she added. Alas, no parenting books. Lots of cookbooks. Might a good recipe suffice for that ever present emptiness? Or my business card?
After fielding two dozen DMs and one man who wanted me to “hold all the Jung for him,” I revised the ad: Open access, 8am–8pm. No appointment necessary.
Well. That sparked a minor revolt. There are strict unwritten rules on Facebook Marketplace. Commandments. I am such a neophyte. Thou Shalt Honour First Come First Served. Thou Shalt Not Sell to the Highest Bidder. Thou Shalt Not Ask for a Deposit. Thou Shalt Respond Promptly to Is it still available? Thou Shalt Not EVER revise an Ad. The reverberations of my sins might melt create a malestorm of hellfire hot enough to met the ice cream empire up the road.
A man messaged in outrage that she had made a 1:00 appointment, thank you very much, and now felt “cheated.” A lengthy diatribe. Like he was going to buy a used car and I sold it out from under him! How dare I?
I didn’t quite know how to respond. How do you cheat someone out of a free book? I offered to curate and hold a box for him. Don’t want my Marketplace reputation in my community to be marred. I would hate to have to move.
The first browser showed up. Polite, spry, and efficient. His eyes lit up when she saw the selection.
15 minutes later, his truck was full. His back, not mine. No tractor involved.
“All of them?” I asked, blinking in disbelief.
He nodded. “I run the library at a retirement residence. These are perfect.”
We watched him drive off with my Jung, my Campbell, my Marion Woodman and my mythopoetic men’s movement collection. It could’ve been a crime scene if it weren’t so beautiful. Fly fledglings, fly!
Now I like to imagine them—those elders—seated around card tables and tea trays, debating Psychology and Alchemy and The Red Book, interpreting their dreams, confronting their shadows over Earl Grey and lightly sugared Digestives.
Can’t you just see them? Doris and Gladys arguing over the animus, Harold insisting his dream of the white buffalo was archetypal and not related to his lactose intolerance and his late night pudding snack. A room full of 80-somethings individuating at the 11th hour.
My shelves, once burdened with volumes, now stand empty. My psyche burdened with book knowledge, now spacious. And instead of sadness, I felt elation. Lightness. Space for the next season. For my last lap. For my 11th hour.
Meanwhile, while the Jungian Elders were setting up their discussion circle, while I was dusting my now too many empty book shelves, my husband was off on a mission of his own. Retrieving a set of sculpted white antique dinner plates I’d found on Facebook Marketplace.
Blame it on Italy.
Blame it on the sunlight at my sister’s table.
Blame it on the way something as simple as a meal becomes sacred when served on the right dish.
I have longed for those plates. Too costly on Amazon, Wayfair, or local shops. Who knew white china was so coveted? And there they were, $75 for the set of 12, with platters and bowls, just outside Shelburne. The woman selling them was using the money to support an early reader program for kids. How perfect. How synchronistic. While my husband loaded the dishes into the car, she apologized for the scratches, the signs of wear and tear. Knowing me, my husband assured, my wife will love them all the more. Dishes with a story or two enhance any meal.
So while I was dispatching Jung to the Jung-curious elderly, she was arming six-year-olds with Hop on Pop, The Very Hungry Caterpillar ,and if the world is to be set right again, Fairy Tale Collections.
My shelves, and my gray matter, once groaning under the weight of scholarly ambition, now exhale. The space feels... hopeful. Not empty. Available.
So let’s tally this up: Jung went to the elders, antique plates came home to our table, and kids somewhere are learning to read.
The circle is around us all, from birth until we die, the sun, the moon, the planets, all circle in the sky…
All thanks to a Facebook ad and a tractor.
It’s easy to forget that we’re still a village. Even now. Even in the chaos. Beneath the digital noise and algorithmic nonsense, there are still people giving books to the aging and plates to the dreaming. Still people who remember that antique things are beautiful and don’t just need care. They need connection.
Not storage. Not sedation. Not the TV turned up loud.
They need curiosity. Conversation. Someone who sees the sparkle behind the cataracts and the beauty in the lines and scratches.
We talk a lot about youth as our future, but if we’re wise, we’ll remember that the elders are our living archive. They are walking libraries—full of stories, failures, resilience, and yes, shadow. They carry the map of where we’ve been and hints about where we might still go, if we dare to ask.
What if we stopped treating aging like a problem to solve and started treating it like the sacred rite of passage it is? The season of distillation. Of storytelling. Of giving it all away, but only after tasting it one last time. On a plate, congruent with our years.
That’s what I hope is happening now, under the fluorescent lights of that retirement home library. That somewhere, a woman with silver curls is reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés aloud to her roommate, while a man with a cane nods in agreement, mid-nap.
And maybe they’re dreaming new dreams. Because individuation doesn’t have an age limit. And transformation, I’ve found, pairs beautifully with tea, and time.
Especially when served on just the right plate.
Facebook Marketplace, it turns out, is not just a marketplace. It’s a spiritual economy.
Books for the elders. Plates for the table. Literacy for the children.
It feels… dare I say… alchemical.
What began as a purge became a redistribution of symbolic capital. Jung would be so proud. My 150th birthday present to the old man.
So, if you come into our house this week and see the empty shelves, don’t mourn. And if you see me drinking tea from a mismatched porcelain cup while eating toast off a sculpted white plate, know this: something beautiful happened here.
Something sacred. Something social. Something soulful.
Also, just a heads-up, if you’re looking for Freud’s Cookbook, it’s somewhere on a nightstand in a long-term care residence in Grey Highlands, probably under a large-print Reader’s Digest and beside a crossword puzzle.