Resolana

Adelma Aurora is an educational anthropologist, educator, and writer whose work explores youth, creativity, and community-based learning. She has collaborated with schools, nonprofits, and arts organizations across the United States. She founded and codirected Resolana Farms, a creative retreat space. She lives in northern New Mexico with her family, animals, and honeybees.

"Adelma Aurora constantly reveals the meaning of querencia, a Spanish word with no clear English language equivalent. Resolana is a wonderful tribute to some of the highest aspirations of the counterculture movement and gives profound meaning to the term 'perseverance furthers, ' found in the I Ching, that provides both a moral compass and means to reckon the proper trail through often conflicting circumstances."--Jack Loeffler, author of Adventures with Ed and Healing the West "Adelma Aurora's Resolana is a brilliant force of story and heart, a stunning accomplishment of generational remembrance. Through her attentive, gorgeous writing, Adelma Aurora honors this intimate and vast place of northern New Mexico, where natural cycles--the cycle of birth death and renewal, the cycle of migration--move in and around us, claiming us with its multiplicity of truths and realities. This memoir of place belongs among the archives."--Jamie Figueroa, author of Mother Island and Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer "Adelma Aurora's reflections speak to another world that still exists in New Mexico, leaving this reader marveling at the family's ability to transcend place, time, and tragedy and live in such a remote and challenging environment. It is not only appropriate for lovers of memoir, but also for anyone who wants to learn more about the nuts-and-bolts beauty and sacrifice of living on, and within, the New Mexican landscape, and about the rich layers of multiculturalism that make it unique."--Carmella Padilla, author of A Red Like No Other and The Work of Art: Folk Artists in the 21st Century "For over a century, outsiders have been flocking to Northern New Mexico and finding something in the landscape and people that moves them deeply. This account of idealistic hippies retreating from the world to an isolated Hispano village in Northern New Mexico evokes with tender strokes the experience of one family that took deep root and found, through hard labor and open hearts, magic, heartbreak, and wonder. But Adelma's story goes beyond that, taking a deep dive into the heartbreak of losing that magical realm and the shattering disruption of its childhood delights--a trajectory all too common among counterculture and back-to-the-landers in Northern New Mexico. Its elegiac tone serves well in the central theme of Adelma's love for and loss of her father and their shared deep bond to the land. Throughout the story, the land beckons and offers refuge and renewal--a place of solace to soothe Adelma's soul."--Don Usner, author of Sabino's Map and Chasing Dichos "In this graceful love letter to a place, and to the spirit of place, Adelma Aurora captures the rhythms of rural northern New Mexico in lush and luxuriant prose. Reading it, I could smell pinon smoke, hear the trickling acequia water, feel the crunch of a shovel breaking hard caliche dirt. Like a monsoon rain shower rumbling across the high desert, Resolana is a book to be taken in slowly, and savored."--Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder and The Wide Wide Sea "Touch this lyrical memoir of family and place with a metaphorical hand and you'll feel the adobe grit of New Mexico's 'Deep North.' You'll hear the pop of heartwood in a hot woodstove, and you'll twist and turn down a winding path from discovery and nurture to loss and ultimate reconciliation. In these pages the circle is completed, and the land endures."--William deBuys, author of River of Traps and Enchantment and Exploitation