There was a mountain that towered above a town. The spirit of the mountain was a young girl, and the spirit lived on top of the mountain.
The spirit worked in a little wooden workshop on the mountaintop. Inside the workshop the spirit made all of the things that make a mountain a mountain.
The workshop looked like an alchemist’s laboratory; there were stools next to workbenches, and on the workbenches there sat beakers and cauldrons filled with colorful brews that churned and bubbled happily. There were shelves above the beakers and cauldrons and the shelves held amber bottles of all different shapes and sizes.
Some bottles sat on a shelf with a sign that read “finished.” The bottles on that shelf had labels with words like “rocks,” “rain,” and “rainbows” written on them. Other bottles sat on the higher shelves, and those bottles held the ingredients the girl would use to make things like the rocks and the rain. Those bottles had labels that said things like “crystals, “clouds,” and “wind.”
When she wasn’t in her workshop the spirit spent her time hiking around the mountain gathering ingredients for her mountain things. One ingredient the spirit had a lot of — more than she knew what to do with most of the time — was silence. The bottles in the workshop labeled “silence” were barrel-sized, and they sat on the floor beneath the workbenches.
Silence was everywhere on the mountain, and because it was everywhere it was easy to collect – the girl just had to leave bottles open outside and they filled immediately. (Though of course it was never pure silence the spirit collected; each bottle always had little bits of noise in it, like the rustling noise of a little animal, or the sound of a pebble falling. But it was mostly silence in the bottles.)
One night, after the girl had spent an hour or two uncorking bottles of snow around the mountain, she gazed down into the town to see what the people there were doing. There was, in the town, from moment to moment, always something new for the girl to consider. There were people in shop windows talking to one another, and there were couples on walks who would sometimes stop and hug and kiss one other as snowflakes the girl had made fluttered around them.
But then the mountain spirit saw something she did not understand. Groups of people carrying pieces of paper in their hands were walking around knocking on doors, and if someone opened their door the people would all talk to the person at the same time.
“What an odd thing,” the spirit said aloud.
The spirit then decided to pack a small pack with a few empty bottles from her workshop, and she started down the mountain. The girl had an ice ax, and she climbed down the frozen waterfalls on the sides of cliffs until she was in a forest, and then she hiked toward the town. The empty amber bottles clinked together softly in her pack.
The spirt wore clothes that were white and different shades of gray. She wore a white cloak and several layers of gray and white clothing beneath the cloak. Her hair was white like the snow and her eyes were blue and her irises glowed a soft blue light in the dark forest. The colder it became the brighter the girl’s eyes would glow.
The spirit entered the town and walked under the differently-colored lights, through the snow she made, until she saw one of the groups with the pieces of paper in their hands knocking at a door. The people wore colorful scarves and colorful beanies. The door opened and a yellow light poured out, and then the spirit heard it.
The people were not, in fact, talking all at once. They were doing something else, and the sound of that something else made the girl stop in her tracks and listen. The people made different sounds at different pitches and at different times, and the spirit soon found herself feeling things she had never felt before. One moment she felt warm inside, and the next she felt sad, and then a glee came to her and she felt like moving her body around. Then she found herself remembering her grandmother, who was millions of years dead by then, and the way her grandmother used to look after her when she was just a small, new mountain.
The sound made it such that when the girl looked at her snowflakes falling around her, they were not just snowflakes anymore, but tiny dancers moving this way and that in sync with the sounds. Then the people stopped making the lovely sounds, and the person at the door, who now seemed to glow just as warmly as the light in their home, said “thank you for the music,” and closed the door.
“Music…” the mountain spirit whispered.
The people left and silence settled once again on the street – but the silence now seemed new to the spirit. It seemed new because the girl suddenly knew what she could do with all the silence in the big bottles on the floor of her workshop, for there was silence between the sounds the people had made, and she knew that silence was an important ingredient in this new thing called music.
The spirit hiked and climbed back up the mountain. She stopped to rest at the top of a frozen waterfall, and she took out her bottles and hummed the tones of the music she had just heard, and she took the notes as they hovered there in the air and put them in her bottles.
The spirit made it back to her workshop and set to work over a clean cauldron. She added a pinch of wind and a fistful of something else, and then, carefully, she added the notes she had sung. Lastly, she poured in the silence.
The spirit took her bottles of music to different spots on the mountain, and she uncorked the bottles.
The wind from the bottles burst forth and raced through tunnels in the rocks and the ice and through forests, and in those spaces – in between stretches of silence – the wind made the notes and then the music that the girl had heard.
The people in the town stopped what they were doing and looked up at the mountain and listened. When the music ended and silence settled once again on the mountain, the people were left with a feeling in their hearts that, if translated into words, said “thank you for the music.” 