The PA Dutch way of living & loving
The PA Dutch way of living & loving
Before you buy anything
Good. That is the correct response to what happened to you, and it is not paranoia. The trouble is that you got misled and had nothing to check against, so everything sounds equally plausible and equally hollow.
It starts with trusting yourself. Not confidence. Not a gut feeling. Something you can actually test inside of yourself. Your body already knows.
Is this true?
Is this mine to carry?
Does it flow both ways?
I am not asking you to trust me. I am handing you the thing you can use to check my information. Run it on this page. Run it on the books. If something here does not hold, do not buy it. A person who wanted to take your money and run would not hand you the tool you use to create it yourself.
Because the tool is a structure, not advice. Advice needs you to trust the person who gave it. A structure you can test yourself, at your own kitchen table, tonight.
Because the ground beneath your feet keeps shifting and nobody told you that it is being moved on purpose. And because the slow drip with no return to your resources works fine for a while, and then one day it doesn’t.
Not motivation. Not therapy. A structure, and the order you build it in.
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries. Twelve places a life comes apart, and how to bring them back into agreement.
The order of the build. Reality first. Then truth. Horizontal before vertical.
Whose weight is whose. What is yours to carry, what isn’t, and how to hand the rest back without wrecking the relationship.
What to say and when. Not yet. We’ll see. I got this. I got you.
How to come back. To the ridgeline to remember, to the hearth to be restored.
All of it aimed at one thing: becoming harder to manipulate without becoming harder to love. That is what I teach.
The PA Dutch Way of Living & Loving
We’re Real. Tried & True. We’re Staying.
Start cheap. Test it.
Come back for more only
if it worked for you.
Three things I want to say plainly: what this land means, what I adore about people, and how both men and women got swindled.
Start here
Most people build a wall and call it progress.
The wall was built to contain you, not to protect you. It is why nobody feels closeness anymore.
Building a door that lets the right people get close and still keeps the predators out is harder work. It is the right hard work.
And you do not create that kind of entryway by becoming tougher. You get there by becoming straight with yourself. Not suspicious. Not defensive. Not walled off. Not collapsing. Not exploding. Not always needing to be right.
They cannot override my ability
to perceive, think, choose,
and act
for myself.
That is a very different thing, and it does not cause you to pull away from others or cause them to pull away from you.
A person who is straight with themselves can listen to influence. They can change their mind, compromise, apologize, make correction, and say you’re right, I hadn’t realized that, and none of it means they surrendered. They do not have to be right in order to feel okay about themselves.
Influence says: here is what I think, then asks, what do you think?
Control says: here is what you think.
One
I love this land.
My family has been here since before it was a country. Nobody got more than the others. Everybody got fed.
My first ancestors arrived here from Switzerland in 1750. All this time later and we are still good at what it takes to build a country: building things and making babies.
I am not going to write you a pretty paragraph about heritage. Here is what I actually mean.
This ground will grow food if you learn how. It will hold a house if you set the foundation right. It will still be here after you, if you tend to it right. That isn’t sentiment. It is a fact you can build a life on, and there are not many things left that you can believe in definitively.
You don’t have to give away everything you own to become free. You don’t have to give up your values, your beliefs, or your standards because times are uncertain. The ground under you can become unshakable. You can become unmovable. When you know what you stand for, how to stand up straight, and how to get going again after something knocks you down, then you have all that it takes.
It’s time to learn how to live here well.
It’s time to learn how to make things that last.
It’s time to learn how to grow things.
It’s time to learn how to use what we have.
It’s time to learn how to build with other people.
It’s time to learn how to leave the earth better than we found it.
That is what I am here to teach.
Two
What I adore about people.
They do not surrender. But surrender and yield are not the same thing, and almost everybody has them confused.
Not all men. Real people. The ones who have been called a wimp, or too compassionate, or too emotional. The ones who stand up for their families and for the people they love. The ones who would do the things they do in broad daylight and not be ashamed of any of it.
Not when it causes a setback. Not when no one is watching. Not when folding would be easier and somebody else would pick up the slack. Real people will stand there holding something long past the point where it stopped being fair, and they will not put it down until life forces them to.
And they have been taught to misunderstand that word. They were taught that surrender is a force applied from the top down, that makes the person underneath do something they do not want to do, quickly and without question.
Steel flexes. Put a load on a beam and it bends, and when the load comes off it comes back straight. That is what it was made to do. Your backbone is meant to work the same way. It takes weight, and it returns.
Surrender is what happens past that point. Load it too far and it does not come back. The bend is permanent. In a relationship, that is the exact place where the thing can no longer be repaired.
So when you ask anyone to surrender, you are asking them to break. No one should ever do that, and they should refuse. Because people just don’t hurt themselves or others.
Yielding is different. Yield means you check before you proceed. You look at the person beside you and you find out how they are holding up before you keep going. And when you do not yield in your own life, or you yield far too much, the Universe will not bring you a fair yield either. They are all related.
Never surrender.
Yield as nature intended.
A woman who turns cold and never softens is refusing to yield. A man who surrenders his own view to hold the peace is bending under the load, and he may eventually break.
Here is what a person with their internal world straight can do:
They can provide without being used.
They can protect without controlling.
They can lead without requiring obedience.
They can receive help without losing dignity.
They can change their mind without losing authority.
They can say “I don’t know” without feeling unworthy.
These are the things internally secure people can do.
Three
We were both swindled.
We were taught to look up first. Nobody said one word about getting level.
Climb higher. Get promoted. Get stronger. Buy the upgrade. Rise above where you came from. Build the tower and put your name on it.
So people have spent all of their resources climbing a ladder that was not on stable ground.
The slow drip.
You work, then you pay,
then you work more, and on and
on.
You cannot build up
until you have built
across.
How it actually happens
Three of the ways the order gets broken.
He gives in too early. He withholds. She pressures him. And either one can call a stop at any time, for any reason.
Men have always known you build horizontally first. That part was never lost on them. What got confused was the order you take to hold the structure under pressure.
She wants something and she wants it now. He knows the frame isn’t set. They are not on stable ground, but he gives her what she wants anyway, because handing it over ends the pressure faster than saying not yet.
That is not generosity. That is the first boundary broken, and everything built from it is now slightly bent. It is not yielding either, because yielding is checking. What that was, was surrender. He bent past the point of return just to stop his own discomfort, and she will lose respect for him later and neither of them will be able to say why.
The other end of the same problem. He keeps their resources from building anything more and calls it prudence, when what he is really avoiding is having to say here is what we actually have, and here is what I am afraid of.
Thrifty is straight with reality and does it in broad daylight. Cheap keeps the numbers secret and lets her guess. The tell is not the amount. The tell is whether she can see the ledger.
And withholding breaks triangulation on purpose. The third point of the triangle is the thing you are both actually building together, and contribution is what makes that point real. You are two points on a line, not a relationship, and a line will tilt in one person’s favor over the other.
Wanting it now is not a character flaw. But asking for the roof while the sill is still being set asks him to skip the order, and that is where hurrying comes from. She is not breaking the boundary. She is standing on the pressure point that breaks it.
“Not yet” is the truth.
Giving in is a lie.
Not acting in
broad daylight is also a lie.
The order is not his to build alone while she waits for delivery. It gets built by both of them, in order, or it does not hold.
Either one of you can stop the work whenever you want to, and you do not owe anybody a justification for it. Just to catch your breath. Just to check whether a hunch is worth listening to. Just to make sure everybody has fresh air and the whole thing is getting done in broad daylight.
Calling a stop is not an interruption of the work. It is part of the work. A crew that cannot stop is not a crew, they are slaves.
And that is where the two rules meet. Nothing has gone wrong here, meaning no permanent damage was done. And you just don’t hurt yourself or others, meaning the stop gets honored the moment it is called. Put those together and what gets born is dignity. Every other blessing comes after that one, and in that order.
Lose dignity and you have lost it all.
No amount of land will ever make up
for it.
The working vocabulary
Six things to say, and when.
Not yet. We’ll see. I got this. I got you. Nothing has gone wrong here. We got this.
Most of the trouble between two people is somebody using the wrong one of these. Two questions sort them: do you have the facts, and where is the pressure coming from.
“Not yet.”
You have the facts, and they are not what you need yet.
Inward facing, and it is the truth. The frame isn’t set, you know it isn’t set, and you say so out loud instead of handing over the finished thing to end the pressure.
“We’ll see.”
You don’t have the facts yet.
The book teaches this one first and it works alone. Somebody presses you for an answer and you take the pause instead of handing them a yes you don’t have.
Then there is the expert move. When an outsider is shaking your ground and neither of you has the facts, the two of you say it together. Now it is a foxhole. From the outside you will look stubborn. You cannot pick off a couple who won’t answer until they know.
“I got this.”
One person, the right person, short term.
Chosen, temporary, out in the open, and it ends. You climb up, you do the work, and you come back down.
“I got you.”
One of you is compromised for some reason.
Weakened, ill, dying. Or slowed down, or occupied with building in another area of their life, such as raising children. You don’t fix it. You stay.
Do not confuse it with the one above it. “I got this” is a job. “I got you” is a person.
“Nothing has gone wrong here.”
The relationship is not under threat.
The ground is still beneath your feet. No one is going to explode or collapse. Nobody is walling off. Nobody is controlling the other. This is what all the right hard work was for.
“We got this.”
One of you rises, and reaches back.
You do not take the new level and leave the other one standing where you left them. Rising without reaching back is using that person to artificially prop yourself up.
And this is where Revelation begins. Once the ground is still and there is finally room: what wants to come through us now?
The right order
Horizontal first. Then triangulation.
Error grows as it goes up. And three fixed points are how you locate yourself when somebody is telling you who you should be.
A framer does not start with a wall. He starts with a sill, laid flat and level and square, on ground he has already surveyed. Set the horizontal a quarter inch out and the wall is a quarter inch out, and the roof is worse, because error grows as it goes up.
A rectangle will tilt. Put one diagonal in it and it cannot move. The triangle is the only shape that builds solid landings as you go higher. That is why a barn has braces, and rafters, and a king post.
Triangulation lets you carry far more load with far less material. Same lumber, more strength.
Triangulation multiplies your yield.
And a bigger yield is the only
honest way
equity gets shared.
Two people alone are a line, and a line will rack, which is the builder’s term for tilting. Two people trued to something outside themselves, the land, the work, the children, a commitment they both actually made, form a triangle. Shared purpose is not a nice feeling. It is a brace.
Triangulation is also how you locate yourself when somebody is telling you who or what you should be.
One point can be argued with. Three fixed points cannot. That is internal navigation.
Is this true?
Is this mine to carry?
Does it flow both ways?
Truth, Responsibility, Reciprocity. Somebody can lean on any one of them. They cannot lean on all three at once.
When something goes wrong
Subtract. Don’t add.
Load is what is breaking it. More load breaks it more quickly.
Everything out there tells you to add. Buy the course. Buy the truck. Take the second job. Put an addition on the home that is already not loving inside.
When a structure is failing you take weight off. You back off the pressure. You subtract factors, one at a time, until you are standing on solid ground again. Then you look at what is left. Then you build again, in the proper order this time.
Deconstruct down to steady.
It will feel like losing.
It is the only
thing that isn’t.
The whole idea
A barn is too big for one family to build alone, so the whole community shows up. But nobody brings a crooked beam and asks everyone else to make it straight. Every beam, just like every person, has to be true on its own. Real first, then true to itself. Then the beams go up together.
A frame is raised from the ground up. Reality is the ground you build on. Truth is the first beam you set. Concordance is the ridgeline, the result of all parts of yourself and your surroundings being consistently steady.
Tap a beam
Beam 01
Say what’s actually true.
The sill. The whole thing sits on it. Nothing above it can be straight if this one isn’t.
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries
They’re twelve practiced ways to build anything that lasts without hurting yourself or others.
How manipulation actually works
It becomes the authority on five things. Take those back and you are not tough, you are organized.
It does not work by force. It works by getting inside your decision making and quietly becoming the authority on five things:
The twelve are the inward turn to grow when the outside pressure starts. Not twelve chores. Twelve practices to orient yourself.
And it begins at the sill. You move from what does this person want me to think to what do I know.
The whole trick is taking those functions back without withdrawing from the relationship. Anybody can get harder to reach. Almost nobody gets harder to move while staying connected.
A boundary is not a wall. It is a joint.
Make a rigid boundary or frame and the first hard winter cracks it.
Go look at the joints in an old barn. Mortise and tenon, cut by hand, pegged with wood. The joint makes it functional. Make a rigid boundary or frame and the first hard winter cracks it. Leave it loose and it absorbs enough to hold. A pegged joint holds the frame together and lets it move, and that is why barns from two hundred years ago are still standing.
Enough structure that you hold together, enough give that you can move toward somebody without coming apart. That is the difference between a person who is intact and a person who is rigid, and from the outside they can look the same right up until the weather comes.
The house has three parts.
Cornerstone, Hearth, Threshold. Wholeness needs all three.
The twelve are not one straight line. The numbered order is how they are learned. The three parts below are how the structure actually stands.
“I know where I stand.”
“I keep life moving.”
“I decide what crosses.”
No cornerstone and you get pulled around. Cornerstone with no hearth, isolated. Hearth with no threshold, porous. Threshold with no hearth, defended. Wholeness needs all three.
Two places you come back to.
The ridgeline is the long term. The hearth is the short term. You need both.
Your life has a ridgeline and a hearth, and they sit at opposite ends on purpose. They are two different ways of staying true to yourself.
The ridgeline is the long term. You look at it to remember what you are building and who it is for. Not daily. Seasonally. Legacy and Stewardship sit in this area. It is the highest point because it is the only place you can see the whole property at once.
The hearth is the short term. You come back down to it at the end of each day so your energy and your heart can be restored. Daily. Every day. Forever.
Four ways a good man puts the fire out.
Not one of them is character. All four are sequence.
He hurries.
Because he was taught to get up there fast. Build in order and there is nothing to hurry toward.
He is carrying too much to stand straight.
He went vertical before he went horizontal, so he is personally holding what a frame is supposed to hold.
He can’t see past the beam in his arms.
A man carrying the whole load has no free hand and no line of sight.
He is young and still learning.
Nobody showed him the order. That one isn’t a flaw.
Come sit by the fire.
Hearth is heart plus earth. Everything else is timber. The hearth is stone.
You have been carrying something heavy for a long time, and a good share of it was never yours to carry. That is the thing I adore about you.
The hearth is not a reward for finishing. It is where you get your energy back so you can keep going. It stays warm because two people keep it warm, and one of them is you.
The part nobody expects
When I don’t need to control you, I can love you more freely.
When I don’t have to make you agree, I can listen.
When I don’t have to carry you, I can help you.
When I don’t have to fix your feelings, I can sit with them.
When I can say no without the whole thing disappearing, my yes means something.
A free yes is far more loving
than a coerced yes.
Am I giving because I choose to, or because I cannot stand what happens if I don’t? From the outside those look identical. Inside they are nothing alike. It was never about how much. It is about where the decision comes from.
Look at the word
Hearth is heart plus earth. Drop the last letter and you have heart. Drop the first and you have earth. Heart is the children. Earth is the land. Women tend to tend the heart first. Men tend to tend the earth first. Neither is the whole job. Both can do both, and in a house that works, both do.
Why the hearth is different
Look at an old farmhouse and you will find one masonry element running through it. The chimney and its hearth, with the two halves of the house raised on either side. The hearth is where the two sides of a structure actually meet.
Timber yields. It flexes and comes back true. Masonry does not. It does not bend, it cracks. So you never ask a hearth to flex. You ask it to hold. And stone keeps radiating heat for hours after the fire has gone out, which is the whole difference between warmth generated and warmth performed.
Drive through this state and you will pass a stone chimney standing alone in a field where a farmhouse used to be.
The timber goes.
The masonry stands.
The blessings the structure exists to protect
When a community raises a barn, people bring timber, tools, food, labor, knowledge, childcare, skills, land and time. Someone knows how to cut the joints. Someone feeds everyone. Someone watches the children. Everyone contributes something.
Freedom, not independence.
Freedom for one.
Freedom for all.
The goal is not to need nobody. The goal is to be able to need people without being owned by them.
The one that is actually broken
You only ever leak out. You never come back.
The going out was never the point. The coming back was the point.
There used to be a season for running around. A young person went out, got it out of their system, and then came home.
Now it never ends. Spring break turned into a way of living, and everything runs one direction. Attention out. Energy out. Money out. Years out.
So people leak. Slowly, for decades. And they cannot name what is wrong, because nothing dramatic ever happened to them. They just never returned.
And here is what they never returned to:
Doing the right hard work alongside other people.
Sharing what it made.
Then standing there looking at it together,
with some pride and some contentment.
That is reciprocal exchange,
and it is the single most broken thing
out
there.
Not because people are selfish. Because nobody ever showed them the return trip.
The tools
No countdown clock, no “was $97.” They’ll still be here tomorrow.
Short pieces on the twelve boundaries, living and loving, and life as I grew up in it. Nearly every week. Nothing to buy in it.
The map. Read it tonight, start tomorrow. All twelve, each with the broken path, the real path, and one move to make today.
The PA Dutch way of living and loving, on paper you can hold. Small enough to carry and plain enough to hand to somebody.
Large 8.5 × 11 write-in workbook. Thirty days, two or three on each boundary, with room to write on nearly every page.
A nightstand guide to a woman’s embodied wholeness. The Twelve build the structure outward. Revelation is the inward turn.
Sit down with Grandma Leitzel.
That is my own grandmother’s way of listening, and it is the one I use when we talk.
Telling your mom sometimes means telling your dad too. Telling Grandma doesn’t. It stops with her. She is on your side. Not the side of who was right. Yours.
And you won’t owe her for the rest of your life. She takes it, she kisses your head, and she moves on.
She listens. She tells you what is real, especially what is yours, and which boundary to perfect. No further commitments.
You pay first. No refunds, because neither of us can get our time back. Boundary #3. Reciprocity in practice.
About Tammy
Boys seemed to have the freedom. Freedom wasn’t based on your gender. It was something people either learned how to build and protect, or slowly gave away.
I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Both my grandparents and my parents made it to fifty years of marriage. As a child I was sent back and forth between my grandmother and my grandfather, carrying messages from one to the other. Long before I had language for it, I was learning how two different ways of seeing can belong in the same structure.
I’m not here to teach women how to defeat men. I’m not here to teach men how to manage women. I’m here to ease the load for everyone, by teaching what nobody taught us about building a life that works.
I still work a day job. I wrote most of this on breaks.
– Tammy
All you ever wanted was a piece of ground, the liberty to do what you needed on it, and somebody who wanted to be there with you.
Then people kept coming around telling you that you were wrong, or that you needed something else. Your neighbors started changing. You figured maybe they were right.
They weren’t.
It’s time to get back to reality.
Get back on solid ground. Do the right hard work. Be harder to manipulate and easier to love.
Free
Short pieces on the Twelve boundaries, living and loving, and the life I grew up in. Plain speak. No countdown clocks. No constant selling. A letter from me, once a week.