We are a Rogers and Astaire sort of outfit, only that we are married and plan to keep on dancing together. Only that we probably drink a lot more coffee. We have unpredictable Scottish clouds and a touch of earthy Texas dirt in us. Derek is from North Carolina and Amy is from Michigan so we like to joke about our marriage being the ultimate North and South.
Derek has lived all over the planet, and in the early years of our marriage we spent a lot of time on the road in both the U.S. and Europe. Friends and family often had trouble keeping up with exactly where we were. We tried to do it through pictures but we sometimes forgot our camera and when we remembered it we tended to take pictures of doughnuts and old cars. (This was all pre-Facebook and iPhones.)
Our lives center on celebrating and beholding identity–in people and places. In both religious and art communities (in which we work), people often suffer from feeling that they are nothing more than their job, their title, their creativity, their ideas. We want to help others celebrate their loose edges and the in-betweens in order to become more whole persons.
Derek and Amy come from backgrounds in the arts, ministry, theater and writing.
Amy is a former music and theater journalist, with a masters in creative writing, and currently teaches sewing and patternmaking through her own business.
Derek is a trained art therapist and former seminary student who left to hit the road as an itinerant minister. (Yes, they still exist.) After living in Europe, we came to Austin, Texas to form an artist’s residential community which ran for about 7 years. We currently devote our time to gardening, study, writing and participating in arts-centered events in the U.S. and abroad.
If we were circus characters, this page would be our calling card.
About the name
We came up with the name “the bearable light” to describe what we wanted to be our life’s work together. It’s based on the famous Milan Kundera novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being–this had significance for us after living in and getting to know Prague, which occupies much of that book’s story. (The movie is great, too!)
