THE STORY

Where a life becomes a living archive.

This story begins in Turkey,

but it does not stay in one place.

It travels through

Finland, Australia, the United States, and Mexico.

Across borders, languages, cultures, and

many versions of home.

I am an immigrant woman.

A writer.

A dancer.

A solo parent.

A documentarist.

For ten years, I worked at Microsoft.

Building systems and translating

between different worlds.

Then life changed

its language.

After my niece died

from a brain hemorrhage in 2023,

I moved to a farm

in rural Eatonville, Washington.

What began as a place to live

slowly became a sanctuary.

This is where I now live with my son,

three cats, a dog, a rooster, and chickens.

Surrounded by trees, weather,

mud, silence, and

the unpredictable rhythms

of the Nisqually land.

Mantra Collective grows

from this ground.

It is where

everything I have carried

begins to meet:

Migration and motherhood,

grief and movement,

technology and earth,

memory and imagination.

Nothing is separate here.

A story can become

a dance.

A feeling can become

a film.

A color can become

a gathering.

Grief can move

through the body and

return as something that

breathes.

I do not create from certainty.

I create from listening.

Sometimes the work

begins with music.

Sometimes with

a word,

a gesture,

a shared meal,

or bare feet touching the ground.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it surprises us.

Nothing is fixed here.

We follow what is alive.

This is not a story about

leaving one life behind.

It is a story about carrying

every place,

every language,

every loss,

and every transformation forward

and making a home spacious enough to hold them all.

This is Mantra Collective.

A living experiment in art, movement, memory, and belonging.

Founder,

Mihriban Pehlivan