Welcome to Vita & Echo
Well, hello. Welcome to the Vita and Echo podcast with myself. I'm Georgia Rose Stewart and I'll be hosting these ventures into the wild fields of the human condition and all things life, death, grief, and loss. So thank you for clicking on this light little potty and coming to listen in to this first rambling. So, yeah, what are we doing here?
Speaker 1:Little about this podcast. It was born out of a desire to hold space, really, for the big questions that we all encounter, the unspoken stuff, the uncertain stuff, and often stuff which is uncomfortable. And, yeah, to be able to process this experience of us being alive, altogether. So please use this space to pause and reflect and discover the lessons that are hidden within the human condition. I understand it can sometimes feel challenging to carve time, to hold space for grief's very powerful voice amongst, yeah, the detachedness and and relentlessness of daily life, but it's ever so important that we do so.
Speaker 1:So thank you for coming here. One truth that we can all be sure of as the mortal kind that we are and probably the only thing we could all agree on to be almost certainly true, as I mean, come on. How do we really know anything is true? But whatever. Conversation for another day.
Speaker 1:But the only shared truth, really, is that we're all united in the fact that we're born and then we die. It's inevitable. Right? And that's kind of like, woah. Scary.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna think about that because I'm gonna die. And, yeah, death is intense. It's obtuse, and it haunts us. It represents a full stop, doesn't it? Like, tap out final destination kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:And we spend our lives both approaching it and moving towards it and running from it despite it being the thing that will always catch up with us anyway. However, death is truth and it's something that has always had us hooked. Throughout all histories, there are these threads of ritual and ceremony that encompass the significance of the end of life and the experience of it and witnessing the profound act of it and the effect that it has on those who are living and and the perspective that it gives us about those things. So when we turn to face this truth rather than using all our modern conveniences to distract ourselves and run and hide from it or even obsessing on it, you know, late at night like monster under the bed kind of thoughts. We actually get the opportunity to build a relationship with it and to give it the love and recognition that it truly deserves.
Speaker 1:And whilst doing that and facing it, we also get to shine a light on the messages that live beneath all of our fears of death and the feelings around when we experience loss. So in this life, I found myself living as a creator and writer and facilitator and a general pondering soul, who loves engaging with human beings. But I've forever been captivated by an ultimate fascination with unsaid stuff and the mysteries of life and death and the things that we're not supposed to talk about. So when I lost my dad in 2021 and a quick succession of other family members throughout the surrounding years, it was only really then that I allowed myself to fully witness this huge divine potency, in all that existence is and really being able to witness it for what it is. And this caused me to kind of reflect on all the grief I've been unconsciously holding in my system for pretty much as long as I can remember.
Speaker 1:And I was kind of swept away by a whirlpool of processing and caught up in my personal accountability. But I became so immersed in the lessons that I somehow always knew that life was trying to show me. Like, death is the biggest thing that can happen, right, to any of us. And from realizing that, grief completely changed my life. Whether it's headlined as a stranger or a statistic or a sociopath or a celebrity that I have no connection to, each person's death I've come across since feels really profound.
Speaker 1:And the death of a loved one or witnessing masses of organized death globally or even remembering something that you missed that's significant to you. All of these things are inevitably sad. Right? Don't get me wrong. But I feel it's also really valuable to recognize that grief can also gift us with with some of the most deep moments of realization and real beauty too.
Speaker 1:There's so much grief within the systems of all humans Topics aren't just abstract concepts for us. They're really deeply personal. So I take the role of hosting these recorded adventures into life and loss very seriously. And I hope the time we share here is something that contributes So to So to start things off on our Vita and Echo podcast adventures, we'll be beginning by sharing a 13 part series with a dear friend of mine who lost her mum to brain cancer in January 2024. And since then, we've been meeting monthly to record her grief story, and I'm so incredibly honored that she's agreed to share her experience with us.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm always blown away and inspired by her approach to life generally, but I really look forward to others being able to connect with her story and her family's experience of moving through an incredibly wild and wacky, intense, intense time. So over the past twelve months in our discussions, we've discovered that at the end of the day, amongst its huge cape of shrouding absence and the friction and dissonance of all that it encompasses, grief is ultimately a very strange and funny thing. It's complex and like a maze and it's trippy and it's volatile, but it's also really enlightening and can be humbling and duvet like and and is ultimately familiar to all of us. So despite it being dull and heavy, it also has these real textures of bright saturation and glimmers along the way. And as much as it's individual, it's also universal and collective in its form.
Speaker 1:Now I'm no professional. I don't have any qualifications or authority to give advice or psychological support or medical know how on any of the things that we might be discussing. But I am a human being just like you, and we don't need any certificate or qualification to warrant us to be able to talk about these things that affect us all. And, yeah, I guess that brings us back to the real heart of what this is all about. It's about us being able to open conversations about this.
Speaker 1:And therefore, I really hope as we move through these fields together that we remember it's not about having all the answers, but more so asking the meaningful questions and sharing the beautiful stories that connect us all. So, yeah. This is just the beginning of Vita and Echo and I'm so excited to see where this journey takes us. But until next time, you go live your life and keep on listening for those echoes, echoes, echoes.