Nothing has ever brought me such a joy and feeling of fulfillment and purpose like the act of movement.

And it doesn’t matter if this movement means walking 12 miles by foot or flying 1200 miles in a hot-air balloon. All right, in an aeroplane, I’ve never been in a hot-air balloon.

The act of movement is essential for me.

This desire to explore, see, learn, experience, taste, this is what has helped our ancestors to find new, better places for life, it is a part of who we are today.

And somehow, this desire stayed preserved in my (and many other people’s) genetical code, eager to show up once there’s a mind compatible with it put in the same body.

Honestly, I can’t even recall, when I started to sense this unexplainable feeling calling me to get out there.

What I remember is that, as a child, still running half-naked on my grandma’s yard (because, why to wear a T-shirt, when my cousins didn’t have to), I found these old calendars with pictures of flowers I didn’t see to grow anywhere home, the animals that weren’t surely from my country, cities as colourful as my markers and colour-pencils and the trees they called palms which I didn’t understand how they could have grown into such a strange shape. But what took my breath away were all the landscapes. And the mountains!

Mountains with the sun right above them, strong and golden, making all the colours the truest. (Is truest even word?)

Mountains with the moon giving them it’s silver beauty.

Mountains with the sun setting down, drawing shapes into the valleys and the sky, making everything pink and orange and deep purple.

Mountain meadows intertwined with rivers, full of fireflies.

Mountains with their tops hidden in clouds.

Mountains with fog lazily moving through the valleys in between them.

Oh, man, it felt like freedom. It was everything a child with a wild imagination like me could wish for. Since that day, I somehow knew. And it took me another ten years (or more) to be able to go out there, by myself, and see everything with my own eyes, to make sure it was true.

Ten years of being patient and waiting.

That day I found this calendar, I cut out these pictures. They are still hidden in a box in my room back in Czech.

♥

I cannot explain this whole thing, this urge, this need which flows through my veins and is in every single dream of mine.

And I don’t know if I want it to be explained.

For me, it’s something as natural as breathing.

I can hear my heart beating at the same pace the waves of the Pacific ocean beat against the Lost Coast.

I can feel my breath flowing through my lungs as the wind blowing through the Sierras, as well as Mongolian desert.

I live for this.

And at the same time, this makes me alive.

♥

There are no words in the world to describe, what the act of movement means to me.

But I believe that if we are in the same ship, you already know. And you know perfectly, what I mean when I say:

This is my life.