I've been a lover of David Williams' photography ever since I first encountered it. His work touches a deep place in us, something ineffable and ungraspable. So much is conveyed, for example, in that black and white image of a small child lurching forward in a snowy field, or the image on the cover of a pregnant woman standing in the sea. Profound truths about life and human experience are evoked or suggested without ever asserting them explicitly. The work is so delicate, evocative and magical. There is an open unknowingness in David's work that I love: "Not knowing in the face of mystery might be at the very heart of it," he says in the accompanying text, "a kind of Rubik's cube of awe and wonder unencumbered by the need to provide answers and happy to simply bow to something way beyond our ken and yet closer than close." As a writer who tries to express nonduality in words, I am in awe of how perfectly David expresses, through his images, the paradoxical mystery of not one, not two - difference and sameness, permanence and change, form and emptiness, stillness and occurrence. He captures the sense of form emerging from no-thing-ness and dissolving back into it.
In "Illusion of Agency" he brilliantly conveys the nondual insight that there is no autonomous, independent self in control of our lives--that free will is an illusion. The "Not Two" series thrills me with the magical aliveness of the juxtapositions. And in the postscript, he writes: "For all the talk of 'non-duality', 'oneness', 'not twoness', 'unicity', 'wholeness'. nowhere have I mentioned the underlying notion which all such arcane expressions perhaps point to - love. My hope is that my work can at least aspire to somehow celebrating the breadth and depth of its mystery." Yes! And yes! That he does, exquisitely. This is a marvelous book.