Kirsten Mustain, Author

Dragonback is damp and the sky is soft slate gray this Sunday.

The bright green color of the newly opening leaves, the moss green of the lake below, the white and pink of blooming dogwoods, and the lovely purple pink hues of petunias and snapdragons glow all the brighter in the cloud-filtered light.

One of my favorite writing teachers once told me that I wrote with an "outsider's" viewpoint ? that my narrative style was the voice of a removed observer rather than a participant.

There is something to this. It is the same reason I took up photography at age eight when my parents bought me an Instamatic camera. When one photographs life, one is removed from the center of the drama. I have always been more comfortable that way.

Up here in my aerie I am the watcher on the bluff. I can see the ospreys riding the wind like white-winged kites and some young people down at the water's edge, their four-wheelers parked close by. Beyond the trailer park, I can see a gray strip of highway, all those tiny pick-up trucks rolling by.

Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song - "With the Birds I'll Share this Lonely View."

I don't know if all humans experience this sort of separateness that is not separateness after all. The watcher and the watched at the same time.

My dear friend, JB, remarked this week, in an email about waves and particles and how scientists have said that waves are waves until they are observed, and then they act like particles (and if no one is observing, how do they know what happens to the unobserved?), that there must be some higher level of observation where the wave and the particle may be viewed as one and the same and not either/or.

He went on to say that he has always thought of empathy as being a key element of intelligence - but that sympathy is even more important, because while empathy - being able to imagine how another being feels - suggests separateness, sympathy - actually feeling with another being - suggests connection.

An outside observer may see the drama more clearly than those who are in the midst of it, but if she observes with sympathy, she might also experience the drama without being in its midst.

Lately I am surrounded at work by a majority of people with whom I don't want to experience any sympathy (which is not to say that I don't have some genuine friends among the madding masses).

I am questioning my life's purpose and my penchant for finding myself in places where I don't fit.

When I was five my favorite song was "The Fool on the Hill," by the Beatles.

It was the same year I wrote my first story in red print on my mother's electric typewriter and illustrated it with crayon pictures of dragons.

And somehow that long ago has shaped this now.