06.15.2024 – 08.43 – Everyone fights in their own way, between ideals of peace, weapons of the heart and hopes of the soul. The battlefields can then be chosen but often difficult to codify, almost unreal or distant from everyday life. However, someone tries, between breaths of martial philosophy, sometimes inhabiting a theater stage and trying to give a hilarious meaning to the home dialect.
Here is a summary of the idea of life Michele Marolla, from Trieste, born in 1956, now retired after a professional career in the local healthcare sector and experience as a Navy officer in the mid-1970s. However, his true course was elsewhere, painted between martial arts And amateur theatre.
Let’s start from the passion for combat disciplines. Michele soon hugs them starting with the Judoif we want a childhood classic, then becoming a pioneer in 1972 in Trieste ofAikido (yes, the one “shot” in Steven Segal’s films) the martial art with bare hands and traditional Japanese weapons, a discipline that (fortunately) abjures the sporting dimension, preferring to orbit, on paper at least, between the difficult dictates of spiritual evolution and of the longing for peace among men. In short, the emphasis here is lurking.
Michele Marolla welcomes the two figures by living them intensely and in various seasons. With Judo he will experience a sporting parenthesis and then teaching, with Aikido a real catharsis: “I followed things in parallel in the way most suited to the time – remembers Michele Marolla – but to live my passion for Aikido I also commuted, often going to Milan to study it”.
Let’s stay focused on Aikido then. In the 90s Michele felt the desire, or rather, the duty to go to the source and landed in Japan, Iwamaabout a hundred km north-east from Tokyo, where agriculture provides daily bread, a town of around 18,000 inhabitants which represents the place where Morishei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, moved from 1942, until 1969, the year of his death, to live an “active” and fruitful isolation for the purposes of preserving his art, already subject at the time to stylistic branches and distortions of the original verb.
In the Spartan climate of Iwama (a name that means “among the rocks”) accompanied by the master Alessandro Titarelli and by an interpreter, Michele Marolla redesigns technique, expectations and requests linked not only to Aikido but to the conception of life: “At the court of master Saito a world opens up to me – he says – but a world made not only of techniques but of philosophy and spiritual insights.”
Iwama will therefore be a postcard of Damascus. Another life, new goals. Michele becomes part of an association (cultural one would say now) dedicated to study and inner research.
The former Navy Officer “mule” now navigates between asceticism and concrete forms of ascent. Yes, like the experience I had in 2000 together with other Budo sul pilgrims Mount Fuji in Japan, on the island of Honshu, a volcano to be precise and over 3700 metres, a sort of natural temple for a catharsis to be experienced with little oxygen and a backpack full of threads to purify: “I proceeded with difficulty on Mount Fuji based on a dynamic meditation – recalls Michele Marolla – It was hard, very intense, it seemed like I couldn’t move my legs anymore but at a certain point it seemed like the mountain itself was speaking to me, opening my mind even more and making me understand, step by step, that Aikido is technique only 10%, the rest is something else.”
Yes, everything else here is not boring (paraphrasing Giacomo Leopardi and not Califano…) and for the Trieste samurai now the practice, apparently free from the fanaticism of chance, is combined with the “Way” that leads to balance, to harmony , to peace.
This path will also be cemented by the love partnership with Giovanna Coen, wife and ally in field research, that is, always in Japan, among further stylistic features of tradition, such as the calligraphy (Shodo) theIkebana (the floral arrangement) and more: “Being curious makes us grow – he states – we must not stop at the facades and discover, explore, with a book and possibly visiting places and people”.
The ranks achieved in martial arts? His belt in Judo is no longer black but white and red, colors that attest to the 6th dan, the same degree resides in Aikido, the latter achievement achieved in May of this year, again in Iwama.
There is the other way. Is called theater, not the Japanese one but the decidedly more home-made one in Trieste dialect, first as an actor and recently also as a director. Michele Marolla has lived this cult since he was a child and found the other “tatami” (carpet) of his life on stage.
It then happens that you attend courses held in Milan by Enrica Barel, someone who defines herself as an “actress and motivator” and who will be able to give the samurai of San Giusto other notes for the research script: “Studying theater I understood how Aikido is fundamentally similar – the new 6th dan states confidently – we must in fact, make yourself available to others and try to put your ego aside to contribute to growth. We work with the same basis to live better. If everyone practiced Aikido and experienced theater in the right way, I believe there would be no wars in the world.”
Who knows if it’s true. Believing in it isn’t such a bad thing, also because you don’t actually need to climb a volcano to do it.
[f.c]
