I’ve never seen the sun at Ivalo. There is light between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon but the snow is all that’s needed to lighten up the scenery. The white makes everything immobile and in places almost surreal but looking around me I note that the reality of Nordic beauty is in fact bright and fun with vibrations of faraway lands mixed with tradition.
Around town an echo of Helsinki is visible in the folk style headwear worn by the girls who drive the husky drawn sledges! Fluorescent lips and pastel hair tones blend in with spectacular optical illusions. Ostentatiously frivolous colours in contrast with the disarming candour of the forest just like the peel-off mask Chrono Chrome® (Agrimer), a visual cosmetic that turns from yellow to orange for a quick 15 minute pick me up! Three actives; turmeric an anti-inflammatory and detoxifier, algae polymarines both firming and hydrating and bromelain a skin refiner and healer in the right place at the right time to bring the shy Northern sun out on the skin. In the country were the nights are long they are going crazy for it!
In bookstores there are methods for rebalancing chakras but more importantly in beauty treatments there are spiritual roots for a more contemporary revival of ‘YOU’ and I’m here for this, to let out the tribal in me! But how? By meeting up with Dopar a noaidi, a shaman of the indigenous Sami people.
A Yupik tattoo around my eyes and wearing plaits – boxer braids apparently (further to a 40 minute tutorial!) helps get me into the part. Now I’m ready to get to know ‘he who sees in the dark’. Dopar welcomes me onto reindeer skins in the darkness of his kota (can he see me then?!) a tent-office in the middle of the forest. ‘You have to live nature to feel it’, he says and in the silence interrupted by crows and owls I begin to listen to myself…
‘Count and breathe’ he tells me but it proves hard to keep thoughts at bay and finding the perfect balance requires practice. With his drum made of rings and horn he starts chanting melodic formulations that are totally incomprehensible to me and my thoughts are lost. Now I’m not sure whether losing oneself to Eurovision contestant Gabbani’s ‘Occidentali’s Karma’ is exactly what he intends as an internal journey but I am ready to burst out laughing, the kind of laugh that is impossible to hold back like a full flowing river: me in the uncomfortable lotus position and the old shaman encircling me calling on the forces of nature!! Outside the wind picks up, who knows…maybe….
I’ll admit it – I wasn’t exactly the model student: unfocused, not serious enough and with extremely ‘hidden talents’ … to the point of being invisible Dopar subsequently remarked with notable satisfaction (had I offended him?). A reading of the shaman map, a personal mantra translated using complicated pictograms is ready and I prepare myself for the inevitable conclusion: ‘If you want to be remembered Cristina, forget yourself and concentrate on others’. Nice I think to myself, he’s telling me to disappear after my appalling performance! Sometimes Dopar, I console myself, absence can mean more than presence….
That evening in my wooden house somewhat more cool-headed I’m left thinking about the day whilst I warm up in the sauna. ‘I need a memory mask – one that’s happy to remember me!’ I whisper to myself as I look in the mirror. And every detail of my face is attended to with Hydrasoft® Sea ER HV (The Innovation Company) a shape memory texturiser made from algae providing a barrier effect for the skin.
On getting back to Italy I promise myself that I shall enrol in some laughter yoga.
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