My grandmother never used the word boundary.
But she lived by an order that had twelve of them working for her.
You are welcome here
Different outside. Same inside.
She made every quilt different
My grandmother made a quilt for each of her grandchildren. No one quilt the same in the whole family.
She knew exactly who each of us was, and the quilt said so before you ever unfolded it.
He made every cabinet the same
My grandfather built corner cabinets, quilt frames, toyboxes, and benches in bulk. Same measurements, same joints, every time. The only thing that made one different from the next was the grain of the wood.
Then he painted your name on your toybox, and sometimes the year you were born. And in the back of every corner cabinet he hid a penny for the year he built it.
Each of us is unique, and we all follow the same order of life.
The PA Dutch Way of Living & Loving
What is the PA Dutch Way?
The way I was raised. Grandparents and parents both made it to 50+ years of marriage. It comes down to three things. Not a program I invented. A way of living and loving.
Twelve Boundaries
Agreements you keep with yourself. One clear line each about what is yours to carry and what isn’t.
Four Qualities
Authenticity. Congruence. Equity. Sovereignty. Hold all four and you’re holding a winning hand.
One Promise
Be free. Be happy. Not someday, after everything is fixed. Today, stopping to reflect and appreciate at the end of each day.
Why there are twelve
Twelve beams
A barn is too big for one family to build alone, so the whole community shows up. At the start there are twelve big beams, and each one has a single job. One holds the left wall. One the right. One carries the roof. One braces the door.
Not a single beam tries to hold up the whole thing alone. If it did, it would snap, and everything resting on it would come down with it.
- 1TruthSay what's actually true.
- 2ResponsibilityHandle only your own stuff.
- 3ReciprocityLet it run both ways.
- 4CapacityCarry what you can carry.
- 5TimingDo it when it's time.
- 6IntegrityMatch the inside to the outside.
- 7StewardshipTend what is yours.
- 8ContributionGive and receive.
- 9DiscernmentDecide what belongs.
- 10RestorationRest on purpose.
- 11LegacyHand down what is worth having.
- 12ConcordanceShare the yield fairly.
The twelfth one is different. Sometimes sharing the yield is just the contentment of a hard day’s work and having helped your neighbor. The first eleven can be done alone. The twelfth takes at least two people.
“Perfected doesn’t mean perfect. It means practiced.”Tammy Leitzel
The books
Two ways. One order.
Everyone tells you to get real. Nobody hands you the tools. These words and ways of living and loving are the tools.
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries
Kindle ebook · read on any device · $6.99
- The exact step-by-step process. Run it, watch what comes back, adjust your approach.
- Mindmaps for finding who you are and what you actually want.
- All twelve boundaries, each with the broken path, the real path, and one move to make today.
- The Barn. Why there are twelve and not five or twenty.
- Frequently asked questions, answered as best as I can.
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries Workbook
Large 8.5″ × 11″ paperback · write-in · $19.99
- Thirty days. Two or three days on each boundary, with room to write on nearly every page.
- Five positions you run every boundary through, the same five questions every time.
- The daily practice. Real in the morning, truth at night.
- A plain test for deciding what is yours to carry and what belongs to somebody else.
- One page written specifically for women. One page written specifically for men. All others apply for both.
Start with either one. No countdown clock, no “was $97.” They will still be there if you come back tomorrow.
The letter
Broad Daylight
Short pieces on the twelve boundaries, living and loving, and life as I grew up in it. I send it nearly every week.
Nothing to buy in it. No countdown clocks. Just the work, in plain speak.
Join, and get the Four Daily Questions
One page you can use tonight. Free. Unsubscribe any time.
About
50+ years of lived PA Dutch experience.
I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country. My grandparents’ marriage lasted more than fifty years. So did my parents’.
What I teach is the way of living and loving that I grew up inside. Plain speak, honest work, planning for tough times, and the warmth that gets made when everyone plays a part in how it was intended to be.
This isn’t therapy. It isn’t even what I’d call coaching. It’s honest feedback from lived experience. The kind you’d get when you have nothing left but the ground you are standing on… and someone wants to take that from you too.
I still work a day job. I wrote most of this on breaks.
She was Mennonite, and plain in every sense of that word. Nobody would have called her the strong one in the family if you were only looking at the outside.
Inside she was the strongest.
She never used the word boundaries. She kept them anyway. When I write about this, hers is the voice I hear.
The word on the spine of her Bible was CONCORDANCE, and it was also the life she lived, all day, every day.
If you want to talk it through
The Talk
Maybe you don’t have your own property for the two daily walks, or a front porch where you can ponder the bigger things in life.
If not, then you can sit and talk with me. I’ve lived a lot of life. I tell it like it is in plain speak. Not therapy. Just a person who cares to listen, and chime in if I have anything useful to say.
You pay first. No refunds, because neither of us can get our time back.
Boundary #3. Reciprocity in practice.
The inward turn
Revelation
A Nightstand Guide to Women’s Embodied Wholeness · 252 pages
You have done everything right. So why are you still so tired?
You could spend a whole weekend recovering and still be worn out by Monday. You have tried on version after version of yourself and none of them fit. And nobody can tell you what is wrong, because from the outside nothing is.
Nothing has gone wrong. You were put in a position that was never meant to be permanent, and nobody told you that you were allowed to come down and rest.
This is the book about how I found my way back. Not by leaving, and not by hardening. It is written for women, and it is the one I had to write first. The Twelve are the order you build once you have made it.