'California Scenario' - a plaza designed by the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi for one small corner of what once was the largest shopping mall in the world, The Southcoast Mall in Costa Mesa. Surrounded by glass and steel skyscrapers, it is an all but forgotten architectural treasure, save for a few office workers that cross it on their way to work or spend their lunch break. To one side is a precise fitting of stones Noguchi titled 'Spirit of the Lima Bean'. Deep beneath those stones are the bean fields of the Segerstrom family that owned and farmed that land for more than a century. Deeper yet in those soils are the ghosts of the indigenous tribes that worked those fields for the Segerstroms and, for thousands of years before that made it their home, without need to own or otherwise possess what the earth provided for them. Most of those tribes are extinct now, forgotten under the layers of peoples that displaced them and, in turn, were buried and forgotten.
These spirit poems appeared as I dug into the history of those lands and discovered some of the cultures and truly exceptional people who once occupied them. Even more startling was to find out how much our history, right up to the present, really owes to these first and mostly forgotten settlers of the California landscape.
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