The Great Blue Hills of God: A Story of Facing Loss, Finding Peace, and Learning the True Meaning of Home

Description

The creative force behind Blackberry Farm, Tennessee's award-winning farm-to-table resort, reveals how she found herself only after losing everything in this powerful memoir of resilience. Born with "the gift of hospitality," Kreis Beall helped create one of the South's most enchanting destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the entertaining world and on the glossy pages of popular home and design magazines. But beautiful exteriors and glowing accolades papered over deep inner pain. At the pinnacle of her success, a brain injury left her with devastating hearing loss. That was followed by the collapse of her thirty-six-year marriage to her best friend and business partner, Sandy Beall--and a few years later, the tragic death of her son Sam, the proprietor of Blackberry Farm, at age thirty-nine. Alone and desolate as her marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey, to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her exterior life and work, now she must begin the hardest undertaking of all- to reclaim her interior life and soul. Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into an unassuming, 300-square foot shed with peeling paint on the exterior walls "where I met myself for the first time." Out of brokenness has come reflection, re-examination, and bit by bit, healing and meaning. By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, and warm, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who has ever searched to find genuine beauty among their own flaws and scars.

Kreis Beall is the founder and director of design at Blackberry Farm, an award-winning Relais & Chateaux hotel and resort in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and one of the country's premier destinations. As entrepreneurial as she is artistic, the Tennessee native carries varied experiences--as hotel proprietor, cook, photographer, interior designer, intrepid adventurer and traveler--all of which share a common thread- Beall's passion for the art of living, her love of beauty, and her knack for transforming big dreams into real, uncontrived elegance.

"A homeless friend once told me that 'rock bottom' was a solid foundation to build upon. Beall's perfectly designed and beautiful Tennessee mountain top life was the envy of many. It was unimaginable that such an elegant, well- known Southern belle would one day be staring at rock bottom from the deep, dark valley of loss and unspeakable tragedy. With grit, atypical honesty, and God as her architect, Beall tells an epic Southern story of rebirth that soars to great heights."--Ron Hall, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Same Kind of Different as Me "Grounded in humility, this heartfelt memoir of love, loss, and healing is a joy to read. You will laugh and cry with Beall as she acknowledges her truth, finds God, and discovers the peace of home within."--Jenny Sanford McKay, author of Staying True "Follow this writer along a switchback path, through the foothills that skirt the Great Smoky Mountains. Here is what grace and faith make possible, here is what honesty in the face of tragedy yields."--John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers "I've been fascinated and moved by Blackberry Farm's signature hospitality for years, and to get to know the incredible woman behind it is a gift. I'm so moved by Kreis Beall's willingness to open wide the door to her journey, her regrets, her learning, her enor mous heart. She has invited us into her story in such a beautiful, life-giving way."--Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author of Present Over Perfect and Bread & Wine