23 Aug MISBEHAVE…and make history!

A good friend of mine gave me this bumper sticker a few days ago. She knows me well. She knows that this speaks to me, makes sense to me and excites me. It reminds me that as women, we are powerful when we step outside of society’s expectations; we make history when we are not afraid to challenge the status quo or ruffle feathers along the way.

My friend is a fearless female. She lives by her own rules and is a champion at manifesting – this makes her one of my mentors.

I am not one for heroes, but there is a woman in history who comes close for me. She personifies the sticker quote. Her name was Beryl Markham – described as “impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Markham was a noted non-conformist…” My kind of woman exactly. She lived in Kenya during the notorious “Happy Valley” era, was married three times and had numerous affairs, including one with the son of King George V and with Karen Blixon’s (Out of Africa) lover, Denys Finch Hatton.

Beryl Markham was a critically acclaimed author, a successful racehorse trainer and an aviation pioneer. She wrote the beautiful memoir West with the Night and, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic east-to-west and the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop. (She crash-landed in a bog in Nova Scotia and survived to tell the tale.)

I LOVED reading West with the Night and recommend it highly. I also read a biography about this remarkable woman, called The Lives of Beryl Markham by Errol Trzebinski. This author tries to dispute the fact that Markham was the true author of her memoir and goes into the salacious detail of her scandalous life. It only made me love and admire her more.

She was indeed fearless and courageous beyond measure.

I challenge you to follow your true path even if it flies in the face of “normal” – even if it means that you “rarely behave”…

You know by now that I love to quote Oscar Wilde and here’s another reason why: he said, “I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

(OK so of course it’s a bit tongue in cheek…I know we need some principles but not at the expense of our freedom to live our truth.)

Misbehave my Darlings and make history…

xo
JS