I left the capital before dawn with a notebook, spare clothes, and a faint ringing in my ears. The bus rolled north for hours, trading concrete for rice paddies, billboards for fog-stitched green ridges.

By midday we were on a single-lane track that hugged sheer cliffs; far below, terraces of taung-zaung tea glimmered pink-white through mist. The air thinned and cooled, sweet with those hidden blossoms. When the driver set me down at a gravel turn-out, the engine’s fade felt like a door closing on the life I’d outgrown. A dirt trail slipped into the trees, and the city noise fell away with every step.

Six mornings later, the forest floor rose into moss-veiled boulders and vine-hung branches arched overhead like cathedral beams. I hiked for hours without hearing another human sound until a sudden hush stopped me mid-stride. Up ahead, tangled roots parted to reveal a clearing washed in pale light.

In its centre stood a weather-worn white stupa, so still it seemed carved from silence itself. Water dripped somewhere unseen; two butterflies traced slow circles over a cracked gong half-buried in vines. A saffron-robed monk stepped from the shadows, smiled, and laid a strip of orange cloth in my hands as if I’d arrived right on time for an appointment I never booked.

One moon has passed since I accepted the robe. My head is bare to the morning chill; days measured by the slow drift of light across the temple stones. I rise before birdsong, climb the cliff above the clearing, and face the valley. Mist blooms from the jungle canopy until sunrise lifts it like a curtain, revealing green tiers rolling to the horizon.

Somewhere below, a lone hearth sends up a thin ribbon of oud smoke that mingles with the cool breath of the forest. In that mingling I find a quiet large enough to hold every thought yet small enough to fold into a single breath. When I leave tomorrow, I’ll press that silence between my notebook pages and know exactly where to find it again.

The bus back to Yangon rattles like a tin drum, but the silence I pocketed in the hills stays intact. At home the air feels heavier, spiced with diesel and street-side curries, yet a single drop of the agarwood tincture I carried down the mountain blooms on my wrist, cool cedar, faint rose, distant smoke.

Friends ask what I found up there; I say it’s in the vial if they want to listen. Tomorrow I start blending: bright Calabrian bergamot for the sunrise, a veil of soft rose for the temple mist, and that Burmese oud heartbeat to anchor it all. I’ll call it Cologne d’Agar—a quiet kept close enough to wear every day.