I couldn't stop thinking about that harbor. Because Newport is where this story begins thrice — once with a guitar, once with a wheel — and once with me.

I. The Husband & Father Who Plugged In

July 25, 1965. Newport Folk Festival. Bob Dylan walks onstage with a Fender Stratocaster and a borrowed blues band and tears into "Maggie's Farm" — his first public electric set. Half the crowd cheers. Half boos. Someone later said he electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other.

The legend paints him as a rebel making a statement. His own memoir tells a quieter story. "I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world," Dylan wrote in Chronicles. "I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation."

He never asked for that job. The folk movement wanted him at the head of a parade, singing other people's battles in an approved voice, with approved instruments. Meanwhile the Beatles and everyone else were reaching for every new sound the studios could make, capturing the imagination of a generation — and Dylan had his own stories to tell and a family to feed. Plugging in wasn't a betrayal of the songs. It was loyalty to them. He refused to be left behind holding somebody else's banner.

Here's the detail I love most. When the crowd howled, and he came back out for an acoustic encore, he didn't have a harmonica in the right key — so he asked the audience for one. A clatter of harmonicas hit the stage. The same people booing the electric guitar threw their harmonicas at him. Then he played "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and walked off. He didn't return to Newport for thirty-seven years.

They booed the tool. They kept buying the stories.

“Like a Rolling Stone” is the song Dylan played when he picked up that tobacco-stained Fender Stratocaster.

This is an unforgettable version of Dylan's classic, played by old-time folk musician Jerome Rubin, who honors the song's gravity and scope. I don’t know the name of the other musicians, but I know the fiddle player just stepped up on stage at the last minute. Isn’t music great? Acoustic or electric.

From The Archive: Jerome Rubin covers Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” Novato HopMonk Open Mic, 2024

II. The Man Who Took the Helm

Fifteen years later, June of 1980, the same harbor. John Lennon — five years into his silence, five years since he'd written anything he believed — stepped aboard a 43-foot boat called the Megan Jaye and sailed out of Newport for Bermuda. Six hundred thirty-five miles of open Atlantic. He'd barely sailed before in his life.

On the third day a storm found them. Twenty-foot seas, winds near sixty-five miles an hour. One by one the crew went down with seasickness and exhaustion — everyone but Lennon and the captain. And then the captain, who had been up too long, handed the wheel to a Beatle and told him, in essence: you've got to drive this little puppy, because I have to sleep. His instruction was six words long: "Focus on the horizon, not the compass."

Lennon steered alone for six hours, harnessed in, waves breaking over him. "I was buried under water," he said afterward. "I was smashed in the face by waves for six solid hours... I was screaming sea shanties and shouting at the gods! I felt like a Viking." He called it the time of his life.

He landed in Bermuda a different man. "I was so centered after the experience at sea that I was tuned in to the cosmos," he said. "And all these songs came!" In two months on that island, he wrote some thirty songs. Walking the Botanical Gardens one day, he saw a freesia labeled Double Fantasy and knew he had his album's name. It came out that November — his comeback, after five years of believing he had nothing left to say.

Three weeks later, on December 8, 1980, he was killed outside his home in New York. The storm gave him his voice back six months before the world lost it forever, or so we thought. That was before “Now and Then,” produced by the three surviving Beatles in 2023 using AI.

III. The Same Kind of Men

That summer of 1980, while Lennon was sailing out of Newport, I was just across the water on Cape Cod, moving into my first apartment in Hyannis to attend Cape Cod Community College — nineteen years old, out of my parents' house at last, my whole life ahead of me like open water. I didn't know a boat called the Megan Jaye had passed my horizon. I carried a brand-new Fender acoustic into that apartment — my high school sweetheart, Colleen, had worked a fruit stand all summer to buy it for me — and I was learning every Beatles and Dylan song I could hold, using music to break down barriers and make new friends.

Then, one Monday night that December, watching Monday Night Football with my roommates, Howard Cosell broke away from the game to tell us John Lennon had been shot and killed outside the Dakota. Everyone in the room was stunned. For me, it was personal. It shattered my senses. Everything his music had taught me about peace, love, and freedom went suddenly up for question, and something in me was lost — a sense of hope.

But his death didn't close a door. It started the seeking.

Two years later, almost to the season, I cast off from the same docks Lennon did.

September 22, 1982 — my twenty-first birthday. My friend Chris and I had spent the summer finishing a 36-foot sloop called the Amy, and we sailed her out of Newport Harbor bound for the East Coast run south, my father standing on the dock in his red Explorer jacket, arms crossed, saying almost nothing. I didn't know then that John Lennon had sailed out of that same harbor twenty-seven months before me. I only knew I was finally steering toward a life of my own.

A hundred miles off Long Island, a Nor'easter found us — the worst storm I've met in forty years of offshore sailing. Thirty-foot rollers, taller than the mast. On the midnight watch, harnessed in with rain pelting my face, I watched the tender I'd built all summer ride the crest of each wave thirty feet above my head, again and again, until the line snapped and she was gone into the dark, swallowed by the raging sea. The crew was below, waiting out their shifts. It was just me, gripping a cold, wet tiller, singing Beatles songs.

Many songs were sung as the hours passed. Cat Stevens came up out of the recesses of my mind: "Tea for the Tillerman" and "Miles from Nowhere." I sang it into the storm, gripping that tiller, gripped in fear and thrilled with exhilaration in the same breath.

I didn't learn until this month, researching this essay, what Lennon said about his six hours at the wheel in his own storm out of Newport: "I was screaming sea shanties and shouting at the gods." He had a wheel; I had a tiller. He was sailing to find his way back to his songs; I was sailing to find a way to write my own. Same harbor. Same kind of night. Same medicine. Little did we know it was all about the journey, and not the destination.

Both storms broke the same way, too. His ended in Bermuda, where thirty songs came pouring out. Mine ended at dawn on a sea gone smooth as glass, the whole crew silent in the cockpit with our coffee, watching the Manhattan skyline shimmer to starboard as we slid down the Jersey coast. I didn't think of it then, but we were gliding past the city where, twenty-one months earlier, outside a building called the Dakota, the man from the Megan Jaye had run out of time.

Dylan got into my blood even earlier. The harmonica I play came down that bloodline — the man who asked a hostile crowd for a harmonica and got a stage full of them. Every song I've written owes something to a storyteller who refused to let anyone else decide what his stories were for.

Years later — decades — my son Grant took his own boat out on her maiden voyage. I was in California, three thousand miles from that harbor, watching him motor out on a phone screen held up to the wind. My father saw me off from a dock in his red Explorer jacket, arms crossed, saying almost nothing. I saw my son off over FaceTime, and gave him the only blessing I had: "Keep your eyes on the horizon — but don't lose sight of your compass."

Different dock, different tool. Same farewell.

I had never heard Captain Hank Halstead's words to Lennon when I said it. I found them only this month, researching this essay, and the hair on my arms stood up. An old sailor's instruction, passed to a new one, decades apart, almost word for word — except mine holds both. The horizon is where you're going. The compass tells you how to get there. You need them together, because vision without bearings is drift, and bearings without vision leave you going in circles.

IV. Dylan Going Electric Was Never the Story

I use new tools to tell my stories — including tools some people believe no storyteller should touch. I write my songs and books with my own hands and my own years, and then I use every instrument this moment offers to give the stories their music, their pictures, their reach. Some folks boo that. I understand them, truly — the folk purists at Newport loved something real, and so do the purists now, but even back then, it didn’t have to be one or the other.

I keep thinking about a song called "Now and Then" — a real John Lennon vocal, sung into a cassette machine in that same last chapter of his life, finished four decades later by his bandmates with tools that didn't exist while he lived. When it arrived, the world didn't boo. The world wept. Because it was never about the technology. It was his voice. It was the story, finally reaching safe harbor.

From cave walls to the printing press to a Stratocaster in Newport to a rescued cassette, every generation's storytellers have picked up the tool the purists distrusted. They had to. The lives we live grow more astonishing with every generation, and the human spirit demands that the telling keep up. The tool was never the story. The story remains the same: a family, a legacy, and a man at the helm.

Dylan didn't explain himself at Newport. He just played for his life, and his life is why he played. The Beatles didn’t explain why they used AI to reunite with the lost leader of their band; they just did it while we wept for their loss and ours. The story didn’t change because they rescued his vocals from a lost cassette tape and created a new song for us to know and love.

Here is my own version of “Now and Then” performed with The SunTurtles in Novato in 2023

From the Archive: The Beatles “Now and Then” covered by Tim and the SunTurtles, 2023

V. Strawberry Fields

My memoir ends in Central Park, at Strawberry Fields — Lennon's memorial, the Imagine mosaic. I walked there with my daughter Grace, Grant's twin, and told her about John Lennon, about how the Beatles shaped my young life and taught me how to dream. I told her to imagine her future and let it unfold naturally, as if the story had already been written. And then she surprised me: sitting on a bench near the mosaic, she asked me to tell her about my book — and about my father, who died before she was born.

I wrote that ending before I ever knew about the Megan Jaye. Before I knew Lennon had literally taken the helm in a storm and steered himself back to life and song, six months before the end. Before I knew, his captain's words were nearly my own.

Some rhymes you don't compose. You just finally hear them.

Dylan took the helm of his own future in that harbor and let the crowd boo. Lennon took the helm of a small boat in a big storm and got his voice back. I took the helm of a hundred years of family story, with every tool I could carry aboard.

We are the same kind of men — the ones who, when the storm comes and the crew goes down, we take the helm.

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🎁 Subscribe free, and I'll send you a welcome gift: an unreleased song, the opening pages of my memoir Taking the Helm, and two paintings for your screen: thejourneyman1.substack.com/subscribe

Tim Cooney, ☀️🐢 SunTurtle Studios® · Valley of the Moon 🌙 · 1 Archive – 100 Years

I’d made the crossing before — coast to coast and back again, more than once, the way you do when you’re still arguing with your own life. But this time was different. This time I came to be with the one true thing I’d found, out of the blue, and to finally build the life I’d been carrying around in pieces for sixty years. We settled in the hills of Sonoma, in the Valley of the Moon, and for the first time in a long time, the compass and the tides agreed, working in harmony.

I’ve been thinking about why that arrival felt less like a move and more like a homecoming to a place I’d never lived. I think it’s because I come from people who did the same thing, journeyed out toward a horizon that they had never known.

My family came here from Ireland and Scotland — hard people from hard places, who got on boats with almost nothing and pointed themselves at a country they’d only heard about. My grandfather was a Renaissance man, a maker of things, the kind of person who could turn his hand to anything and usually did. Somewhere back up the line there’s an ancestor named Peter Grant, and when I trace the thread from him down through the generations to me, sitting here in California writing songs and books, I understand that I am not the beginning of anything. I’m a continuation. The dream I’m chasing is the same dream that put my people on those boats, and me on my own.

My maternal grandmother was the first storyteller I remember; she would share the stories of her childhood with great enthusiasm and what sounded like urgency. All of it traced back to one man, Duncan Grant of Banffshire, Scotland. Duncan had a son named Peter Grant, born in 1786, who sailed to Nova Scotia in 1806. He offered his skills to homeowners looking for work wherever he could find it — a pattern I would adopt after setting off on my own journey as a boat builder and carpenter, nearly two hundred years after Peter Grant forged the same road. I, too, took on jobs all over the country, using my tools and my wits to build a future for myself, finding love and starting a family along the way, passing the dream on to my own children and grandchildren.

“You’re My Safe Harbor,” from the Journeyman Soundtrack Vol III

That’s the thing I most want to say in this letter, on this anniversary. My own and America’s 250th birthday.

We climb out of difficult beginnings. All of us, or our people, did, somewhere back there. My own beginning was difficult in ways the book spells out, and I won’t rehearse here — but I climbed out of it the same way everyone does who ever climbs out of anything: with faith, hope, and love. Those weren’t slogans in my house. My mother taught them to all her children as tools you actually use, a set of instruments for steering when the sky goes dark. Faith was the compass. Hope was the horizon you kept sailing toward even when you couldn’t see it. Love was the harbor you were trying to get everyone home to.

I’ve come to believe that underneath all our noise, we want the same handful of things. The freedom to chase a dream. A fair shot — real equal opportunity — for anyone willing to do the work. And a society we’ve made a little better than we found it, one we’re not ashamed to hand down to the next Americans coming up behind us. That’s not a political statement. It’s older and simpler than politics. It’s what got the boats moving.

People have been coming to America for generations seeking their dreams. Jack London found his version of it right here, in this Valley of the Moon, and wrote it into the ground he walked. But here’s what I’ve learned in a lifetime of journeying and four years of living in my valley: there are valleys of the moon all over America. Yours might be a coastline, a mountain town, a city block at the hour the light goes gold, a kitchen table where the people you love are still sitting. The beauty isn’t rare. It’s just easy to sail right past when you’ve got your head down, chasing the dream so hard you forget to look up at the reason for it.

That might be good advice for a couple on their anniversary, but also for a nation celebrating its 250th birthday.

So that’s my invitation, and it’s really the whole point of this project.

If you’re moving too fast to notice your own valley of the moon — because you’re building something, raising someone, climbing out of your own hard beginning — then pause here for a few minutes every other Friday. Read the letter. Follow along. See what I see, hear what I hear. I’ll bring you the paintings, the photographs, the songs, and the stories behind the book, and maybe somewhere in there you’ll catch a glimpse of your own beauty, right where you already are.

Four years west, and I’m still just getting started. I’m glad you’re here for it.

Faith, hope, and love —

Tim

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Welcome aboard The Journeyman Project — a multimedia memoir unfolding in real time, told in story, song, and image by Tim Cooney.

It’s the living home of the book Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides and the Journeyman soundtrack — a hundred-year family archive becoming a book, a body of music, and a world of paintings and images, shared one piece at a time.

☀️🐢 Studios One archive, one hundred years.

Everything here at SunTurtle Studios is my original work, coupled with a hundred-year family archive turned into songs, paintings, photographs, and now a memoir. This is my welcome and my promise: I’ll keep creating and sharing, and I’ll always reserve the best of it for the people who came aboard first.

Here’s the exclusive sneak peek into the origins of the project and a new song from the forthcoming release in the Fall of 2026.

🎵 Angel’s by My Side — an unreleased song from the forthcoming album The Journeyman Vol III. A first listen, before anyone else.

And as promised:

📖 Taking the Helm — Compass & Tides. (The Opening Pages)

Where the story begins: a box, a mother’s hidden manuscript, and the silence underneath a family.

Prelude — My Mother’s Gift

There are stories families tell, and there are stories they survive. For most of my life, I believed I knew the difference.

I grew up in a house where stability depended on what went unspoken. My mother disappeared into hospitalizations that no one explained. My father stood at the center of everything, measured, disciplined, and certain, holding the structure in place. What mattered was not what was true, but what could be held together.

I learned that early. I learned how to protect, how to contain, how to keep things from breaking in front of other people. I carried those instincts into my own life without question. I built a career, raised a family, and created something that looked solid from the outside. It was never as solid as it looked.

Years later, when my own son began to unravel, I responded the only way I knew how. I stepped in, held things together, made decisions quickly, and told myself I was helping him. Each time things fell apart, I moved faster, worked harder, and believed I could fix what was happening. I thrived in chaos.

What I didn’t see, what I couldn’t see, was that I wasn’t breaking the pattern. I was repeating it. I had inherited rescue as a language before I understood it as a pattern. The story I thought I had escaped was already working its way back into my life, not through the past, but through the way I loved the people closest to me. The same logic, the same silence, the same need to protect at any cost.

I was already facing an impossible decision I didn’t know how to make when I finally began to understand that. What does it mean to love someone when the way you’ve learned to love them is part of what is destroying them? And what does it cost to change that? This is the story of how I came to those questions.

The Box

I opened the box one year after my mother died. I knew I wasn’t prepared for what was inside.

She was eighty-six when she died in 2023. In the decades before that, no matter where I was, Florida, California, somewhere in between, she wrote to me. The letters arrived steadily over the years, handwritten, careful, and consistent, as if the act itself mattered as much as what she was trying to say. The letters were filled with family news, prayers, observations, and the small details that made up a life. Now she was gone, and the letters had stopped.

I opened the box but didn’t go through it all at once. I couldn’t. I moved slowly, piece by piece, looking at each item without fully knowing what I was seeing. On top was her Bible, the one I had given her nearly fifty years earlier, a King James version in large print, worn soft at the edges from years of being carried from prayer meeting to prayer meeting. The margins were filled with her handwriting, notes, and underlines that traced what mattered to her, and a cover she had made from gold wrapping paper still held it together.

When I opened it, it fell naturally to her favorite passage, Corinthians 13: Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. She believed that. She even had a license plate that read CORINTHIANS 13 and carried it from car to car until she could no longer drive. It was her way of moving through the world, quiet, steady, certain that her message of love would reach everyone who read it, even at 55 miles an hour.

I set the Bible aside and looked deeper into the box. Every letter I had ever sent her was there, postmarked from places I had passed through and lived over the years, short notes and letters, not important on their own, but together they traced a life I had spent moving while she stayed in one place.

Then I saw it. At the bottom of the box was her manuscript. I suddenly felt like this wasn’t something my mother had left behind. It was something she had been holding back.

She had started writing it in 1971, after her father died suddenly and after nearly losing her own life giving birth to her eighth child in thirteen years. It was as if she needed a witness. At night, after the house finally settled, she would sit alone with her Royal typewriter, the sound of the keys carrying down the hall. I could hear it again just holding the pages.

Beneath the manuscript were my grandfather’s home movies, converted to VHS tape, the same ones my aunt had given me in 1992, telling me I should be the one to hold them. He would show us films in his basement as children, the projector clicking as images flickered across the bed sheet he draped over a clothesline, reflecting my mother’s privileged life as a child during the Depression and WWII in the 1930s and 40s. Her family and mine are moving through another time, another version of America, showing me the seeds of my own origins. I stood there, looking at everything spread across the table. It wasn’t just a collection of memories; it was a family record. And somewhere inside it was the part of our story that had never been fully told. I didn’t know it yet, but what I was looking at was not just the past. It was a pattern I would face again in my own life. I understood that the same silence I was about to discover had already taught me how to love my own children, and how to nearly lose one of them.

The next chapter, My Father’s Letter, is where the silence finally breaks. That’s in the book.

🎨 Promise Land — a painting for your screen.

Press and hold (or right-click) to save Promise Land for your phone. And here are the Golden Hills of Petaluma — my first California painting — for your desktop:

Stay close. Every week or two I’ll open a little more of the archive right here, in The Vault.

And when the new SunTurtle Studios store opens later this year, you’ll be able to redeem your Promissory Note — a code for a free Promise Land poster, good through December 31, 2026. It unlocks the day the store launches, not before; I’ll email you the moment it’s live.

Thank you for being here. The bigger the journey, the better the company.

Tim Cooney, SunTurtle Studios — Valley of the Moon

I made my first recordings down there on a reel-to-reel I received as a Christmas gift. I wrote songs in a notebook with a pen and listened to my 45s by the Beatles and the other artists of the Woodstock generation. That was the beginning of a lifetime of creating and collecting. I wrote my first songs in that studio and never stopped. There was no cloud; there was only a shoebox to keep those songs and tapes safe.

Fifty-odd years later, I sat in a different studio — this one in the Sonoma hills, three thousand miles west — and opened that shoebox of my life’s work. Letters. Photographs. Home movies. My mother’s manuscript. Reels and tapes and lyric sheets gone soft at the folds. An archive I’d been carrying, literally, from house to house, coast to coast, for decades without ever fully reading it. And when I finally laid it all out and began the slow work of turning it into something — sorting it, naming it, digitizing it, letting one piece talk to another — something happened.

I saw my own life from a different plateau.

Not from inside it, the way you live a life — head down, getting through the day, surviving the storm in front of you. From above it. I could see the whole path I’d walked, and the people and things I had loved along the way, and the shape of the thing I’d been building ever since that first studio in 1969. The process didn’t just preserve my history. It revealed it to me. It gave me the strange gift of meeting myself again.

That’s when it began to sink in.

Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials are the last generations born before the digital age, who both experienced and remember an analog world but grew and thrived in a digital one.

For my entire life, I have been collecting and preserving my analog heritage, not knowing exactly what I would do with it, and I know there are many people with similar archives.

The Journeyman Project is built around the idea that these archives and the stories they tell should be preserved as the last witnesses to that turning point in human history. A world I saw coming in the 1980s and helped build a bridge to today.

Last spring, I stood at MoMA in NYC with my daughter Grace, in front of a display case holding one of the first Macintosh computers ever sold at scale, the iconic 1984 “Big Brother” ad playing on a screen beside it. I didn’t just watch that revolution — I sold it. I sold those first Macs and the machines that followed, right up to the very first MacBook. In 1992, I was teaching a class at UMass on emerging technologies and helping to build a brand-new major: Business Information Systems. I hold the first BIS degree ever issued by the UMass system. We were selling the dream of a multimedia platform that could do almost exactly what I’m doing right now, as you read this — except it was the late 1980s, and the internet didn’t exist yet.

At the MoMA in NYC, talking to my daughter about selling Macintosh computers in the 1980s

In 1992, I sold hundreds of Macintosh PowerBooks.

Computers Without Fear, Mashpee — August 1995. (That’s me, far left.)

Introducing The Macintosh 1984

It took forty years for the dream to become the tool. I wonder what Steve Jobs would think about the dream now. I can finally merge my archive and seamlessly create and recreate new forms of art, using it as an endless source for storytelling. And the same platforms that once felt like noise now carry those songs and images out to people I'll never meet.

Think about that for a second. If you remember recording songs off the radio, a rotary phone, a darkroom, a mixtape, the thunk of a car door before sensors and screens — if you remember being bored, genuinely bored, with nothing in your pocket to fill it but a harmonica — then you are part of something that is ending. Not your life. A condition. You were born into a world that existed before the digital age began, and you remember it. You can speak with authority because you lived in both eras.

The children born today — fifty years after we celebrated America’s bicentennial in 1976 — cannot. Never again will a human being arrive on this Earth untouched by, and uninfluenced by, the digital world we built in the last fifty years. From their first breath, it will be the water they swim in, invisible to them the way water is invisible to a fish. They will inherit it whole, and they will never know the before.

There is an irony in that, and a truth we have to sit with. The generation that built the digital world — the Boomers, Gen X, the Millennials who straddled the ages — is the last generation that will remember the world it replaced. We are the bridge. We have a foot on each shore. And bridges, eventually, are crossed and left behind.

Which means our archives are not clutter, they are the last record of a pivotal marker in the evolution of mankind. A generation on the fulcrum of a quantum leap in man's consciousness.

The shoebox in your closet, the slides in the carousel, the letters in your mother’s hand, the songs on a cassette labeled in pen — these are the last first-hand documents of a way of being human that is closing behind us. The ordinary, particular, fascinating lives — each one a curiosity in the human experience, each one a witness to mankind’s transition. Every person who remembers the pre-digital era is a primary source. And right now, in this narrow window, we finally have the tools to save it.

That’s the part that still surprises me. For the first time, the technology that’s erasing the analog world is also the thing that can preserve it. The same tools that let a song reach thousands of strangers overnight can take a basement full of fading tape and a box of brittle letters and carry them forward, intact, into whatever comes next. We can document the last analog generation using the digital one. We can hand our grandchildren not just our stuff, but our story — the texture of a world they’ll never touch.

Here’s what I learned down in that work: you think you’re organizing files. You’re actually meeting yourself. You think you’re preserving the past. You’re actually understanding it for the first time. All of it suddenly aligns and has purpose. And the dragon you’ve been carrying around from coast to coast — the unspoken things — it loses any power it once had the moment you write it all down and look at it after the long climb and from a higher plateau.

So this is the work I’ve created: to document and preserve these stories, mine and others’, before the last people who remember the pre-digital world are gone. I imagine a master archive of the last analog generation — Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and the first digital children who can still hear the echo from their parents. To prove that a life’s worth of work in a drawer is not junk. It’s the last record of a race of people that is soon to be no more. And that’s a record worth saving.

I built my first studio in a basement in 1969 because I had something I needed to get out of my head and into the world. I’m still doing it. The equipment changed. The mission, it turns out, never did. Here is a sample of how my shoebox became something else entirely.

Folk Singer from The Journeyman Vol I

If you’ve got a box of your own — open it. You might be surprised who you meet in there.

— Tim

This is the world of The Journeyman — the forthcoming memoir Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides and the soundtrack and archive around it. If you’re carrying a box of your own life and don’t know where to begin, stay close. That’s exactly the road I’m mapping. Join the crew — and come aboard.

I live now on the same Sonoma hills Jack London wrote from. He called the Valley of the Moon home. He came here at the end of a life of restless wandering — sailor, gold-rusher, war correspondent, for a time the most famous writer in America — to put down roots at last, to build something on the land that would outlast him. I understand that better than I can say, because I came to these same hills the same way: a wanderer, late in life, trying to stop running. Of course, it’s London I think of most when the wild comes to my door, remembering that he saw the same horizon as I look at every day, he from the east, me from the west, and we both came to know the same wild neighbors.

He is not the only one. Thoreau — a native son of my own Massachusetts— went to Walden to live deliberately, to front the essential facts and learn what the woods had to teach before his time ran out. Emerson called nature the symbol of spirit, and said it always wears the colors of our mood. Whitman looked at a single blade of grass and saw the journey-work of the stars. And Mary Oliver gave the whole tradition its plainest instruction: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

I’ve kept company with those writers my whole life, and especially this spring. Because the longer I sat finishing a book about my own life, the more the world outside my window seemed to be trying to get my attention. A weasel in the grass, a deer on the golden ridge, an egret, motionless in a shallow pool, an owl in the cedar at dusk: each one, a messenger if I am still enough to see and hear them.

The long-tailed weasel made an appearance this morning— a very rare event indeed, popping up out of the grass to see who was sneaking a peek at him doing his morning work. The one who hunts underground, that hunts in the hidden places, choosing to pause and visit me while I finish a book that hunts for secrets hiding in dark places.

The oldest use of nature in our literature is seeing ourselves in the lives of the plants and animals that share the natural world with us. London and these other authors made the wild a mirror of the animal in us, the part that still connects the long, constant fight-or-flight instinct with our modern lives.

The Great egret began paying regular visits and decided to stay. It patiently waits each mornin, standing in the shallows, still and focused. turning waiting into an art of survival. Reminding me that my own waiting has purpose and meaning.

And the owl — the wise one, keeping watch from the high branches at dusk. Knowing the things that are hidden from the rest of us, its spirit is that of a seeker. It came at the very beginning of the writing of Taking the Helm, as if to say, I see you there, be who you are.

Then came the coyote at first light — the survivor, the wanderer, misunderstood and to some, scary. Its spirit is resilient and adaptable, straddling the human and the wild worlds in its habitat. An example to all who take the time to notice.

The deer, a regular visitor, grazes the hills without a care, knowing me; it looks at me as if to say, “I see you, and I am not afraid,” telling me to be at rest. We in the valley live alongside each other in nature’s web, and it is easy to feel a union with each of the animals that live here. Why is that? The unique way they each fit into the wild of the valley of the moon makes each of them shine in their own light.

Hummingbirds are a sign of joy and hope to many. They come each day to drink from the flower blossoms, fighting to claim their territory, doing their busy work at 80 strokes a second. This one was not sure if I was friend or foe, but after a brief inspection, it realized I was just another admirer, and went on with its work, leaving me to wonder about the joy and the hope that fill my life.

I think what the deer, the owl, the hummingbird, and all the animals have been telling me is: see me, let me show you who I am, be astonished, live well in your own form, and be who you already are. When we allow ourselves the simple pleasure of being ourselves, and we embrace our own nature, we immediately feel we belong where we already are.

When we feel that we belong in both places, the wild and the world we built around it, a person can look around and find something astonishing: themselves. They can discover that they were never out of place and that their true nature belongs to both worlds.

The weasel in the grass, the owl in the cedar, the pink light of the moon set, the deer, the coyote, and the hummingbird. Even the lingering fog floating along the ridge in the morning moonlight— they are not asking anything of me other than to be who I am, join with them, and rejoice in the nature of the place we each call home, the Valley of the Moon.

I painted this painting in 2023 at the beginning of my time in the valley. I was enchanted by the rolling hills and redwood trees, and all the wildlife that made its way to my door to welcome me home. I called it Promise Land and felt that my arrival in the Valley of the Moon was a fulfillment of a promise I made to myself many years ago. To be who I was always born to be, and so, I began to write Taking the Helm- Compass and Tides. Many of the songs I wrote alongside the book made their way onto the Journeyman soundtrack that accompanies it, including Acorn Sprout, a seed of a song I brought with me from Massachusetts and planted in the Valley of the Moon.

Acorn Sprout: From The Journeyman Vol 1. A song and a painting about a little acorn that grows into the biggest tree in the valley, rooted in one spot its whole life, it survives many droughts and fires to become the oldest and largest tree in the valley — it has grown into itself, and the world comes to its door, astonished.

— Tim

Thanks for reading. I’m Tim Cooney — writer, singer-songwriter, and painter, and the author of the memoir Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides. New essays, songs, and artwork most Fridays.

🎧 Spotify:

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The Journeyman is the multimedia memoir project of Tim Cooney — the book Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides*, a three-volume soundtrack, and the paintings and photographs of a life of reinvention. If this reached you, subscribe and come along.*

The Big Edit

Six months of finishing the book, a morning in Glen Ellen, and the lineage I didn’t know I was claiming.

It has been six months since I last wrote here, and there is a reason. We called it the Big Edit. Since December, Cindy and I have been working side by side, sentence by sentence, story by story, cutting the manuscript of Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides from 135,000 words to a little under 90,000. Six months at the table. Twelve chapters of structural revision. Two title changes. One throughline pulled taut until it sang. Finishing a book is a different discipline from drafting one. Drafting is invention. Finishing is judgment.

The original title was The Journeyman, and it carried the sense of a long, searching life. But as Cindy and I went deeper, the throughline became unmistakable. This was never just a journey. It was about the moments when I had to step forward, take responsibility, and make life-changing decisions in trauma and uncertainty — often without clear visibility, when the stakes were highest. The maritime metaphor I had lived for years at sea came into focus. Not decoration. Truth. The book moves across five generations, from Ireland to New England to California, through silence, loyalty, and the things families don’t say out loud. It is about what we carry, what we choose to leave behind, and whether love alone is enough — which, I have come to understand, it is not; but it’s all the hope we have. It is about taking the helm of a life when there is no land in sight.

The book is finished. Ninety thousand words. Every page earned. It is now with literary agents. So that is where I have been. That is what I have been doing.

Yesterday, before the next phase of the work begins in earnest, Cindy and I drove to Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen, just over the ridge from where we live. I look at those mountains every morning from the west side. Jack London looked at them every morning from the east. We had been sharing a horizon for a long time without my realizing it.

Home on the Range in Sonoma: The Sonoma hills, painted this spring during the Big Edit. The same range where Jack London used to ride, just outside my window in Petaluma, where I now live.

It was a return visit. Three and a half years ago, Cindy and I had walked the same grounds at the start of all this. On that first trip, I bought a biography called Jack London: An American Life, by Earle Labor. I went home, read it, saw myself in Jack’s story, and how he turned his suffering into art. I began to write, and one hundred and thirty-five thousand words came out of me. That book opened the door. Yesterday I came back to pay my respects with the finished manuscript in my hand, and I walked out with another book — Author Under Sail by Jay Williams— six hundred pages on Jack London's life as a writer and entrepreneur, his struggles with publishers and agents and fame, his thousand words a day for the rest of his life.

The cottage was open — the small house where he lived and died after Wolf House burned, the dream-house he had built and lost. His office still overlooks the same range of hills he wrote about and where he immersed himself in nature. I took video, took photos, walked the grounds slowly — I want to know what he knew.

It only struck me later, driving home, that the photograph on the cover of my own book — taken off Newport in 2013, twelve years before I had a manuscript to put under it — is itself a portrait of an author under sail. I had been one all along without knowing it, and Jack London has revealed that fact to me.

Two visits. Two books. Poetic, perhaps. Omens, more likely.

I have noticed, lately, that I keep arriving at the doorsteps of American letters by some quiet design. I lived in New Bedford for years, where Melville wrote about a white whale. I live now within view of the ranch where Jack London wrote Call of the Wild and died at forty. A Stanford English professor I watched recently asked a question I have not been able to shake. America, he said, has not produced a folk hero writer of London’s or Melville’s stature in over a hundred years. Whatever happened to men like that?

I am not making a claim. I am noticing a question. There are whole scholarly societies that dissect every word Jack London ever wrote, and what those scholars have always understood is that he wrote for his life, not just to pay the bills, but to stay alive. After everything I have been through, I read that, and I think: yes. That is the engine. Same stakes, same machine.

Then, on the wall of the museum, I found this:

“Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.”

— Jack London

I stood in front of it for a long time. The whole project — the memoir, the three-volume soundtrack, the paintings, the photographs, the family archive — is the sum of all the arts I have spent my life practicing. The book argues that love is the engine beneath it all, even when it is distorted into rescue and codependency. I didn’t know I was looking for that quote; it found me. It will be the epigraph of the book.

There was another thing Cindy and I learned at the museum that I cannot stop thinking about. After a broken first marriage, Jack London found Charmian Kittredge — strong, independent, fiercely her own person. She became his editor, his fiercest reader, his biggest supporter. He wrote beside her until the day he died. Charmian had been the engine behind everything he wrote in his last and best decade. Cindy and I read the placards and looked at each other, holding hands. After my own broken marriage, Cindy returned to my life 38 years after we last met— strong, independent, fiercely her own person — and became my editor, my fiercest reader, my biggest supporter. She has been beside me at every page of this book. Charmian. Cindy. Different centuries, different lives. Same engine. Same love.

Tim and Cindy, the thesis of the book is in four letters.

Walking Jack’s estate at Glen Ellen, my phone buzzed twice in quick succession. Both of my sons called me on the same afternoon. Grant was on Cape Cod Bay, on a boat he had bought himself, carrying on the maritime tradition I had raised him in. Ben was on Martha’s Vineyard, fully employed, in affordable housing of his own, five months sober after fifteen years of bipolar disorder, addiction, and the long, slow ruin a parent watches when he cannot make it stop. The night before, my daughter Grace had called while she was driving back to New York from Cape Cod, her new Australian boyfriend beside her. She was on her way back to a life built on her dream of becoming a fashion designer, and at 22, she is living it at Calvin Klein. She told me she had never been happier. “I can’t believe this is my life,” she said. Three of my children, in twenty-four hours, from three different lives, had each found a way to take the helm and chart a course toward a life worth living. I stood on the path holding my phone in one hand and the copy of Author Under Sail in the other, and I understood, clearly, all at once, why I had been writing and that the book had revealed its truth.

The Big Edit is over. The manuscript of Taking the Helm – Compass and Tides is finished. It is now with literary agents who could change the trajectory of the next decade of my life. The waiting is its own kind of weather. I will hear back when I hear back.

After this book finds its audience, a second book awaits. Of Flesh and Blood will examine, from a decade’s worth of music, transcripts, paintings, writing, photography, and travel, how we arrived here — how love becomes rescue, how rescue becomes inheritance, and how we use art to tell our stories and build our own narrative. That is the next ship to leave the harbor. This one is preparing to set sail.

Yesterday, in Glen Ellen, on the property of one of the last great American folk hero writers, I got something that doesn’t need an agent’s permission. I got the epigraph for my book. I got three calls in twenty-four hours. I got a glimpse of what the chain looks like when it has finally been broken. And I came home with the woman who has been beside me at every page, who saw me before I saw myself, in the long tradition of Charmian and Jack.

I think Jack London would have understood.

— Tim Cooney

Glen Ellen, California · May 28, 2026

Cover concept for Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides. The final cover will be designed in collaboration with the publisher.— Tim Cooney

Tim sailing off Newport 2013

Glen Ellen, California · May 28, 2026

Dragon Slayer — New release from The Journeyman: Volume III

🎧 Dragon Slayer is part of Volume III, the closing movement of The Journeyman soundtrack, releasing alongside the memoir Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides.

The dragon in this song isn’t a monster from a fairy tale. It’s the one that camps outside your door and whispers I love you more — the voice of codependency and control, the inherited habit that “studies your fear” and “makes you seem small to keep you near.” This is the song where I stopped waiting for that dragon to leave and decided to face it.

It’s a fighting song, but the fight is a quiet one: early-morning meetings, a hike in the cold, keeping your word, telling the truth. Dragons hate daylight — so the sword here is honesty. And the bridge admits what anyone in recovery knows: the battle never really ends, because dragons can fly. You don’t slay this one once. You slay it every day.

I wrote it for the boy who still believes in his fate, and for everyone who comes after — slay it for your daughters and sons, for the legacy we leave. That’s the whole project in four lines: break the chain, so the next generation never has to.

Intro: The Seekers
Across centuries, the sea has called my family’s name, beginning with my 7th-generation great-grandfather, Peter Grant’s voyage from Scotland in 1807. Many years later, in 1982, I took to sea like he did, sailing into the Atlantic chasing my dreams, and searching for something I could not see or name. In 2025, with my 22-year-old son, Grant, named after that Scot, we took to the sea again. Each journey has carried not only the thrill of adventure but the hope of healing. Each generation courageously expressing its own vision, its own courage through storms, through loss, through love, trying to find its way home.

Peter Grant was the first in our line to hear the sea’s calling, to look upon the horizon and trust that freedom was worth the risk, and the courage he demonstrated has never left us. It lives on in me and my children, my son’s name, our blood. We are seekers — men and women, who chase truth through changing tides, winds, and waves, and through our deepest thoughts and expressions.

Peter Grant immigrated to Nova Scotia from Scotland in 1807 at age 21—my 7th-generation great-grandfather.

The Soul Search

I grew up one of eight children, poor and in perpetual chaos. Still, I survived that tumultuous beginning, left that life behind, and, through patience, persistence, and perseverance, I built enough wealth to never worry about working or being poor again. And by my mother’s example, I’ve learned to be spiritually present and a seeker of the soul. The sea also taught me that lesson. It reminded me that you can chart every course in life, yet still drift without purpose if your compass isn’t set to find love, give love, and be loved.

When I was building my businesses, I never worked on Fridays. Not because I lacked ambition, but because I refused to trade wonder for wages. While others chased the next deal, and recognition for their accomplishments, I was focused on nourishing my soul by nurturing the souls of my children, dropping them off and picking them up each day from school, preparing their lunches, working with them on their passions in the studio I built for them, kneeling beside them at night, praying for love to guide our lives, and teaching them how to sail and master the language of the sea. But the biggest lesson was that the best measure of wealth is time spent with the ones you love

Top: Tim and son Grant Aboard the “Won For Us” 2025 Bottom: Captain Tom McNulty, Mates Tim and Grant Cooney and Grace Cooney at the Brooklyn Marina, Nov 2025

⚓ The First Journey — September 22, 1982

In 1982, when I was twenty-one, I took my first real leap into the unknown. I joined a friend, Captain Chris Black, a kindred spirit and born adventurer, on a small sailboat bound down the Atlantic Coast, offshore, and by the Intracoastal Waterway. Chris had a gift; he didn’t just sail; he believed. He believed in the sea, in fate, and in the wild beauty of a dream.

Chris’s belief filled the sails of that tiny boat, and he taught me to chase the horizon even when I couldn’t yet imagine what waited beyond it. To this day, I carry the rhythm of that voyage. I learned how to weather brutal storms and to interpret the sound of the wind blowing against the canvas and the waves crashing against the hull as the first song of my life as a seeker.

During the long, quiet hours between tides, I read a book that became my inspiration: Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, the true story of a Nova Scotian mariner who immigrated to America and lived in Bristol County, Massachusetts, where I also grew up. In 1895, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe alone, an actual lone wolf. Slocum proved that solitude could be sacred, that one soul, guided by faith and curiosity, could find peace at the edge of the world.

Forty years later, in 2022, by fate or happy accident, I discovered another seeker at the Jack London State Park near where I currently live. I found myself at Wolf House, the mansion Jack London built that burned to the ground before he had a chance to see his dream become reality. He built it as a retreat for artists and dreamers, but the dreams would die in the flames that consumed it. I read his Biography, An American Life by Earle Labor, the biography of the restless adventurer who rose from poverty and began writing as he lived: fiercely, honestly, and courageously through personal trauma and near bankruptcy.

London wrote through desperation and with purpose. He transformed struggle into story, work into art, and survival into reinvention, and I saw myself in the pages of his story, a reflection of my own experiences. After reading his biography, I was compelled to tell my own story. It was at that moment that The Journeyman was born, not as a book, but as a way of realizing that so much of life’s education comes through storms, through surrender, and through finally embracing the person you were born to be.

The lone sailor and storyteller, Joshua Slocum, sailed to find his true spirit. Jack London wrote to find his voice and claim his soul. I have learned from both men that art, born from love, loss, and faith, is the only compass that always points home. And I, like them, learned that the journey is not about escape, but about return. Return to truth. Return to love. Return home.

Slocum taught me endurance, and London taught me expression. They both taught me that the real journey is within, and the journey home is love itself.

Pictures from the first Journey, 1982.

From the Top: Captain Chris Black, Helmsman Tim Cooney, The Sailing Vessel, Amy, Captain Chris, and Seasoned Seaman Tim Cooney Arriving in Ft. Lauderdale, November 1982.

🚤 The Second Journey — 2025

In 2025, more than forty years after that first voyage, the sea called again, not through a whisper but from within, but through the voice of family. My brother-in-law, Captain Tom McNulty, reached out and invited me and my son Grant to join him on a passage from Harwich to Hilton Head. The timing could not have been coincidental; it seemed to me the winds of fate were blowing once again. Tom is one of those rare captains whose authority comes not from command, but from compassion. He has weathered storms no man or sailor should ever face, yet he emerged wiser and steadier, his heart tempered by loss and strengthened by love.

Sailing with him was a privilege. His calm at the helm, his quiet humor, his ability to read both tides and the risks that come at sea. All of it reminded me that the sea respects those who endure and who respect the sea as a teacher. He led with grace, and through him, I understood what true seamanship really looks like.

He demonstrated faith on his journey, using his compass to find love again with my sister Terre and, through her, to find his way home, not to a harbor but to a family that cherishes him. His grace at the helm reminded me that endurance is not just surviving the storm; it’s learning how to steer through it with your heart still open and thriving in the face of life’s challenges.

Sailing beside Tom and Grant felt like the sea itself was welcoming us home. As the three of us traced the same course I’d once traveled as a young man, I saw my son at the helm, calm, capable, curious, the living continuation of our family’s extended relationship with the sea.

He didn’t need me to teach him what to feel. The sea was doing that already.
Some wisdom is spoken through waves, not words.

From Top: Map of our route, Captain Tom and mate Grant, Captain Tom and First Mate Tim Cooney, The “Won For Us”, Why we do it video.

The Healing Elixir of Art, Music, and Love

The sea gives and it takes, but it always leaves behind wisdom for those willing to listen.

For me, that wisdom became The Journeyman, a vessel not of wood, but of words and music. My art, my writing, my songs, they are all attempts to bottle that healing elixir, the transformation that comes when you surrender to truth and let your pain become your teacher.

That same elixir lives in my grandson Mason, the child of my son Ben, the living continuation of our story. Although his parents are absent from his life, Mason’s love and laughter fill our hearts as we all wait for their healthy return. He is proof that love can rebuild what fear and addiction have destroyed, and through the love of his maternal grandmother and me, his Papa, and his extended families, he is embraced as the light he truly is.

And then, like a light rising over still waters, there is Cindy, the love I lost and found again after thirty-eight years. She saw me before I knew who I was, and she saw me again when I had finally become the man I was meant to be. Ours is not just a love story; it’s a resurrection.

To love her again required courage, to break the cycle of codependency, to release the need to rescue, to stand in our truth. That act of letting go, of loving without fear, became its own form of art, a living song of reinvention.

She is my safe harbor. My calm after decades of sailing through rough waters. My reminder that when love returns, it brings everything we thought we’d lost with it. Ours is a love that transcends time, not built on need, but on recognition. She is the still water after a storm. I never stopped sailing toward her, and the proof that what’s meant for us will wait until we’re ready to receive it.

To love her again required breaking old cycles. It took courage, honesty, and surrender. But the reward was freedom, not just for me, but for everyone watching. My children. My grandson. My readers.

Because love, when reclaimed in truth, becomes medicine. The very elixir that turns storms into art and pain into peace.

From Top: Tim and Cindy, Santa Barbara, 2023, The Good Ship, 2015, Sailing The Nantucket out of Edgartown, MV, 2015, by Tim Cooney, Newfound Lake by George Donohue, My grandfather Circa, 195?

🧭 Children of the Sea

As the crew of the “Won For Us” followed that familiar path down the Atlantic coast this fall, through Mystic, Brooklyn, Cape May, and Annapolis, we met up with my daughter, Grace, in Brooklyn, a gifted designer and artist now leading a team at Calvin Klein, courageously living her dream on her own terms while navigating the concrete canyons of New York City, living her destiny just like Peter Grant, our ancestor who bravely dared to follow his dreams.

There was poetry in that symmetry: a father and his twins charting the same course that so many before had traveled, each searching in his or her own way for something still unknown. Grant listened more than he spoke, as he held tightly to the helm and the waves crashed over the bow, absorbing not just the blows, but the stories I told of my past adventures, and the rhythm of the waves themselves.

They were learning what I had learned decades before: that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the willingness to keep moving through it.

And while at safe harbor, in the quiet moments, and the still waters between tides, I thought of my oldest son, Ben. He is still at sea, caught in the long, merciless currents and brutal storms of addiction. But I hold faith that one day he’ll find his bearings, raise his own sail, look to his compass, and begin the long journey home. The sea has always called our family back to itself, and I want to believe it will one day call him home again, too.

From Top: Tim and Cindy in Santa Barbara, 2023, Our Family Santa Monica Yacht Center, 2023, Our Kids’ Grant, Grace, Nick, and Dan, Los Angeles, 2023

⚓ The Legacy

From Peter Grant’s first crossing in 1807, to my own at twenty-one in 1982, to the voyage in 2025 with my son and brother-in-law, the same current carries us: the enduring faith that the sea can transform us if we let it. Joshua Slocum showed that solitude can become a sanctuary and sailed alone to find his soul. Jack London proved that struggle could become a story and wrote to redeem his. And my journeys have taught me that art born of love, loss, and faith is the only compass that always points home, and I, like them, learned that the journey is not about escape but about finding your home.

The real journey is within.
The journey home is love itself.

Leaving Charleston Harbor aboard the “Won For US” on November 5, 2025

🌅 Reflection & Conversation

Every generation must take its turn at the helm.
Some are called to chart new waters; others are called to make it home.
But all of us, in our own way, are sailors — learning to trust the wind even when we can’t see the shore.

Who helped you find your way through the storm?
Whose light still guides you home?

Share your reflections below.
This is a space for seekers, artists, and soul travelers — those learning to live by their own tide, one honest wave at a time.

💬 Share your thoughts in the comments — I read every one.
💌 If this piece resonated, restack or forward it to someone who might need it.

Leave a comment

✍️ With gratitude,

Timothy Bernard Cooney
Author of The Journeyman
Founder, SunTurtle Studios — Petaluma, California

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For those walking their own road of reinvention — may your compass stay true, and may every storm remind you what love can rebuild.

The day I turned twenty-one, I left home on a 34-foot Sloop, heading for Florida, and it changed my life forever. This year, I turned sixty-four and will be taking the same route down the East Coast, leaving from Harwichport, Massachusetts, and docking at Hilton Head ten days later. Forty-three years after taking that first journey, I am fortunate to be able to retake the voyage with my twenty-two-year-old son, Grant, who was named after my great-grandfather, Peter Grant, who left home in Scotland on a sailing ship at the age of twenty-two in 1780 to sail to Nova Scotia. The symmetry is rare and beautiful.

I learned a great deal on my voyage back in 1982, and the country was a much different place in many ways, big and small. What stuck with me the most was a profound respect for the ocean, its immense size, and its capacity to give life. I feel fortunate to be able to spend ten days on the water with my son and pass that love on to him, and I hope one day he will be able to do the same with his son.

As a parent, one of my roles is that of teacher. I always tried to influence my children and grandchildren to appreciate the natural world around them and find their place within it. Raising my family on Cape Cod, it was easy to show them the beauty and wonder of the beaches, bays, and islands that were literally in our backyard. We spent our time walking on the beaches and trails, and enjoyed sailing and growing our own food in the garden. I took them on long bike rides through the winding paths of the cape, criss-crossing bogs and dunes along the way. We hiked the trails from the lower end of the cape in Provincetown to the upper cape at Woods Hole in Falmouth, and we sailed and camped every summer on Martha’s Vineyard with family and friends.

As an artist, I have found no better way to express my love of nature than through my work, honoring it in my words, paintings, photographs, and songs. By doing so, I aim to leave a lasting legacy that inspires others and provides a path for them to follow. Over the years, I have photographed and painted thousands of landscapes and written hundreds of songs that reflect my deep connection to the earth, sea, and sky. It is through this legacy that I hope to help others discover their own connection to her divinity.

After taking the past year to write my book and produce the soundtrack for The Journeyman, I recently took some time to acquaint myself with the natural surroundings in my new backyard here in California. We are blessed to have many natural wonders in our state, and three hours west of us lies Yosemite National Park. I have always been fascinated with the park and the ancient trees that call it home. The sights were breathtaking, and the experience left me with a spiritual resonance. It is hard to describe the feeling when you enter a space you have been thinking about for fifty years for the first time, especially a place like Yosemite.

We entered the park from the west side near Groveland, Hwy 120—a beautiful drive into the foothills of the Sierras. We climbed to 6000 ft along the winding highway that clung to the side of the granite cliffs as you entered the park. As we approached the valley, before the descent, we drove through long, narrow tunnels, half-cylinders, some with finished roofs, others with raw granite still showing the scars of the blasting that had carved the hole in the mountain above. We were staying outside the park, and every day we entered, the experience was the same. I was compelled to stop and stare, and each new angle of the granite cliffs and the majestic waterfalls left me speechless. So, I turned to my camera and canvas, as I often do.

Entering Yosemite from Rt. 120

We stopped at the first overlook, compelled to stare. There it was, Half Dome. It was massive, shining brightly in the equinox sun; it was September 22, the fall equinox, and my sixty-fourth birthday. The top of the boulder was so round and bright, reflecting the sun’s rays like a mirror. The face was a straight drop, 5,000 feet down to the valley floor—the other cliffs around her seemed to kneel at her feet, their bent knees bowed to her majesty. El Capetan kneeling before her grace while the three brothers guarded her with their towering and thrusting peaks. I was like a leaf blowing in the wind, hardly worth notice in another day of their timeless journey.

On the third day in the park, we drove over to Mariposa Grove, an ancient grove of Sequoia trees, the oldest one being over three thousand years old and fondly called the Grizzly Giant. The trees in the grove and the surrounding land have been protected since 1864, marking the first time land had been set aside in the United States specifically for preservation, which ultimately led to the creation of the National Park system. Abraham Lincoln signed the executive order without ever seeing the trees himself. Later, Teddy Roosevelt would camp under the same trees with John Muir, the renowned naturalist, and be convinced of the necessity of protecting places like Yosemite for all time.

One snowy night in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir lay beneath the Grizzly Giant in the Mariposa Grove. Wrapped in blankets on the forest floor, they talked long into the night, but the real power in their conversation wasn’t only words—it was the silence of the trees themselves. Branches that had stood for two thousand years whispered over them, reminding both men that they were brief guests in a cathedral of living giants. By morning, Roosevelt called it one of the most memorable nights of his life, humbled by a truth larger than politics: that in the presence of great trees, the only lasting power is reverence.

While in the park, I took hundreds of videos and photographs, and I managed to complete two paintings during my five-day stay. My photos and paintings convey more about the wonder of my experience than I ever could, so I am sharing them here along with some select videos. If you ever get a chance to visit the park, I highly recommend it. However, I suggest you stay within the park; it allows you to avoid the ninety-minute drive into the park each day and will enable you to welcome the morning in the valley.

Tim Painting at Yosemite 2025

Yosemite Valley during the Fall Equinox 2025 (Tim Cooney)

Yosemite during the Fall Equinox 2025 (Tim Cooney)

El Capitan and The Three Brothers 2025 (Tim Cooney)

The Grizzly Giant Mariposa Grove Yosemite (3000 yrs Old)

Cindy with The Three Sisters

Half Dome - Yosemite National Park

Climbing El Capitan is not for the faint of heart! I was shocked when I heard today, just a week after visiting the park, that a young climber had fallen to his death climbing El Capitan. He was known as the Orange Tent Guy; he was only 23 years old. I photographed him while I was in the park. I remember feeling a sense of dread as I pondered what it would be like to climb the great cliff and dangle there until I was ready to climb again. It is a tragedy, and it’s hard to know why these things happen. We each seek a connection to the valley in our own way, and we can fall under the spell she cast on us. I am compelled to paint her, and other people to climb her, each of us drawn to her majesty and grace.

Half Dome 202

Orange Tent Guy, R.I.P. Yosemite El Capitan Climber 2025

Half Dome Sept 22, 2025 (Tim Cooney)

Mariposa River Yosemite Valley 2025 (Tim Cooney)

I look forward to sharing my memories from my trip along the East Coast next month. Thank you for following my work. If you enjoyed your time here, please share it with a friend.

You can find more of my work, including the soundtrack to The Journeyman, on my website, all streaming services, and social media links

https://www.sunturtlestudio.com

This week’s new release.

Acorn Sprout is more than a song about a tree — it’s a parable about acceptance. From the small beginnings of an acorn in the sand to the tallest tree in the land, the story isn’t about striving to be something else. It’s about becoming fully what you already are. The tree survives droughts and fires, puts down roots, and stands steady through time. By the end, it grows into greatness not by yearning to be something it isn’t, but by staying true to itself.

That message echoes across Taking the Helm - Compass and Tides. In many ways, the journey is less about chasing an external prize and more about uncovering the identity that was there from the start. Folk Singer declares that identity boldly, while Acorn Sprout accepts it quietly. Together, they remind us that wisdom isn’t found in becoming someone new, but in embracing who we already are.

Acorn Sprout

I remember the exact moment the acorn sprouted! It found me when I was playing guitar at my friend’s house in Massachusetts. I came up with a little riff and the first line: “ I started out as an acorn sprout. Spring came along, and I poked my head out.” I had the presence of mind to record it on my phone, but it was no more than an idea and a riff. After moving to California, I was performing every week at the HopMonk session room in Novato, California, and I was running out of covers. I began writing some new songs, and I started looking for demos I had written earlier during the pandemic. That’s when I found Acorn Sprout, and it is now one of the featured songs on The Journeyman soundtrack.

I remembered I had this tiny seed of a song (pun intended), so I went back over my recordings looking for it. I pulled the song out and began to build some new verses with my partner, Cindy’s help. We worked on it for a day or two, then I spent the next couple of weeks working on it in my studio. The new song emerged, and I played it at the HopMonk open mic several times, solo and with the house band. It was well-received and was requested more than once over the following years.

Acorn Sprout is a story song, a song about the reality of being a tree and never being able to leave where it is planted. It is left to dream about what life would be like if it could roam the earth like humans, and how it was destined to be where it landed, growing into itself with patience and grace, high on a mountain bluff. After enduring a tree’s worst fears, fire, drought, and time, it digs its roots deep into the hillside, holding on year after year. Thanking the winds that make its limbs and roots strong, the sky above that showers it in starlight, the valley below that puts on spectacular seasonal shows of flowery blooms, the birds on its branches that come and go with purpose and pleasure each season on their way somewhere else, and the sound of children playing nearby. With time and humility, it grows into the most enormous tree in the land, and people come from the world over to see it stand its ground year after year overlooking the valley high atop its bluff—a witness to time itself and a testament to the strength of accepting one’s own place in the world.

I am linking to a live recording of Acorn Sprout, captured on an iPhone, in which I am playing guitar and singing lead vocals at The HopMonk. There is a second link to the studio version I created using Suno software; they sound very different. Working with the new technology in the studio has given me a new tool to tell my stories with, and the two productions evoke very different feelings as a creative producer. Writing the songs and performing them live with a band is hard to beat. The experience of bringing my original music to life in front of an audience is a real thrill. At the same time, taking those songs into the studio and producing them with the latest music and video production techniques helps me tell the stories in a whole new way. I was an early adopter of the multimedia dream in the eighties when I sold Apple and IBM computers. It was only a dream then, but now it is a reality, one I yearned to see. Now the story can be entered from many doors.

Being able to produce songs in line with my artistic sensibilities and distribute them this way has resulted in tens of thousands of new listeners. For me, it all comes down to storytelling. The songs, paintings, lyrics, and photographs below all tell stories of trees, but in different media. Because of that, they each create different thoughts and feelings in the viewer, all influenced by their own experiences with trees, no doubt.

What are your memories of trees in your life? I would love to hear some comments.

Acorn Sprout, Studio Version

Acorn Sprout Live

Acorn Sprout

Written by Tim Cooney

I started out as an acorn sprout
The spring came along and I poked my head out
The summer sun, it felt so fine
So I set down my roots, gonna make this place mine

Chorus
I was born a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I’ll ever be
That’s my reality
I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me

Grew a couple branches out on my side
A real good place for the birds to hide
The kids like to play all up in my shade
I thought to myself, I got it made

Chorus
I’m just a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I’ll ever be
That’s my reality
I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me

The next ten years went by so fast
The present now will soon be the past
I kept on growing and I got so tall
Then came the drought and I hit the wall

Chorus
I’m just a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I’ll ever be
That’s my reality
I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me

The fires rip through from year to year
But I stay safe way up here
I was lucky my roots run deep
I pray to God my soul to keep

Chorus
I’m just a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I’ll ever be
That’s my reality
I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me

Being a tree is sometimes rough
But you can’t beat the view from on top of this bluff
Yeah, I’m planted here and I can’t go far
But I found my place under these stars

Chorus
I’m just a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I need to be
That’s my reality
I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me

Now I’m the biggest tree in all the land
From an acorn sprout in the sand
And the people come from near and far
Just to see me, I’m a rock and roll star

Chorus
I’m just a tree, that’s me
Take a look at me
I’m just a tree, that’s all I need to be
That’s my reality
I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me

Over the years I have painted dozens of trees, here are just a few of them.

Acorn Sprout 2023

The Canopy 2022

My Son and Moon 2015/20

The Storm 2018

The Apple Tree on the Bay 2020

Tree of Life 2015

The Tree Outside My Window, Chatham, MA, 2020

Some of my photo’s of trees.

Muir Woods 2025

Autumn Day 2023

The Red Woods Muir Woods Marin County California 2025.

Buy The Journeyman Soundtrack at the link below.

Folk Singer 2023

When I was growing up, we would buy our music on small vinyl record called 45s. They were called that because of the speed at which the record traveled around the turntable before you would put a metal needle onto the top of the spinning record, and the music would play. There were always two songs on each record an A side, which was the single that was being played on the radio, and a B side, or flip side. Acorn Sprout would have been the single and Folk Singer the flip side.

I wrote this song when my son Grant was in town for a visit in 2024. I had taken him out to some of my performances while he was here, and after he left, I wrote the song in about ten minutes. I was telling him how much I enjoyed writing and recording my songs, and how much music has helped me on my journey. Music was always there when I needed something to do to satisfy my creative impulses. I realized just how long I have been writing, recording, and playing music, and it goes back to when I was three. My parents would tell me stories about how obsessed as a child I was with music of any kind. I write about it quite a bit in The Journeyman Project.

Folk Singer & Acorn Sprout: Two Songs, One Root

What does it mean to know who you are? Two songs — Folk Singer and Acorn Sprout — approach the question from different angles, yet they end up standing side by side like mirrors. One rooted in metaphor, the other in declaration, both carry the same truth: identity is not something we chase, but something we claim.

In Acorn Sprout, the story begins small. An acorn in the sand grows into the tallest tree in the land, not through striving to be something else, but by leaning fully into what it already is. The chorus repeats the mantra: “I’m just a tree, that’s me… and that’s alright with me.” The strength of the tree is not its ambition, but its acceptance — its willingness to endure drought, fire, and time while still standing tall. The tree does not apologize for being “just a tree”; it thrives because it never pretends to be anything else.

Folk Singer takes that same philosophy and applies it to the artist’s journey. Where the tree simply grows, the singer declares: “I’m a folk singer, that’s who I am.” The repetition is assuring, as if naming the identity over and over helps make it real. The verses trace childhood longing, the joy of playing, and the mystery of inspiration: songs arriving “like a divine mystery,” guitars always in hand, words tumbling out almost without thought. Yet beneath it all is the same refrain as the tree’s — an acceptance that this is who I am.

The most striking link comes when Folk Singer nods directly to Acorn Sprout:

“I wrote a song about a tree
And how he wanted to be free
He was the biggest tree in all the land
From an acorn sprout in the sand.”

Here the two songs intertwine, making explicit what was already implicit: the folk singer and the tree are one. Both claim their place not through power or striving, but through truth. Both remind us that freedom comes not from becoming someone else, but from finally standing fully in who we are.

If Acorn Sprout is the parable, Folk Singer is the testimony. Together, they show that whether you grow roots or write songs, the journey is the same: to accept yourself, to endure, and to keep giving — shade, music, presence — to those around you.

That’s the heart of The Journeyman project. The path is long, the trials are real, but the destination isn’t fame or fortune. It’s the quiet, powerful moment when you can finally say without hesitation: “That’s who I am — and that’s alright with me.”Together, these songs reveal two modes of becoming: the natural and the chosen. Acorn Sprout teaches that identity can be found in surrender, in letting time and struggle reveal your shape. Folk Singer shows that identity can also be an act of will, a loud embrace of what stirs your soul. Both reach the same place — a sense of rootedness, a harmony between what you are and what you do.

In the end, the tree and the singer are mirrors of each other. One finds truth by simply growing, the other by simply singing. And both remind us that fulfillment doesn’t come from chasing what we’re not — it comes from inhabiting fully what we already are.

Folk Singer

Written by

Tim Cooney

Folk singer, that’s what I wanna be
It's been that way since I was three
Music has always stirred my soul
I’m gonna be a Folk Singer till I get old
I'm a folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer

I couldn’t help it, when I was young
I would sing from the top of my lungs
I'd write it all down in song
And everyone would all sing along….
I’m a folk singer
Yeah I'm a Folk singer
Yeah, that's what I am

I wrote a song about a tree
And how he wanted to be free
He was the biggest tree in all the land
From an acorn sprout in the sand
….I’m a folk singer
Yeah I'm a Folk Singer
I'm a folk singer


I’m a folk singer, that’s who I am
I’ll sing my songs whenever I can
I want to fill the world with song
Now, how can that ever be wrong?
I’m a folk singer
Yeah I'm a folk singer

I’ve written songs about being free
I write more about you and me
I carry my guitar across the land
My guitar is always in my hands ….
I’m a folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer
That's who I am

I write my songs, they just come to me
It's a divine mystery
I don’t know where they come from
I write them down, and I start to strum
I’m a folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer
Yeah I'm a folk singer
Yeah I'm a folk singer


I’m a folk singer, that’s what I do
I spend my day's singing songs for you
I only want to fill the world with song
Now, how can that ever be wrong?
I’m a folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer.
I'm a folk singer

I spend my time playing songs for you
That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do
Thanks for spending your time with me
Without you, I wouldn't be
A folk singer
Yeah, A folk singer
That's what I am

I spend my time playing songs for you
That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do
Thanks for spending your time with me
Without you, I wouldn't be
A folk singer
Yeah, I'm a folk singer
A folk singer
I'm a folk singer
That's what I am

“Folk Singer, That’s Who I Am”

-Tim Cooney-

Westport MA, 1976

Ft Lauderdale 1982

Annapolis MD, 1982

Sandwich MA. 2013

Novato California 2023

You can now get special access to my early release of the soundtrack through my Bandcamp Page. Followers get early access to the book when it becomes available, so get on our email list to stay updated on the project’s progress.

Click the buy or the share link below to obtain The Journeyman Soundtrack Volumes I and II. Your support makes it easier to navigate the twists and turns of my journey to become a published author, and I’m thankful to have your interest in my project.

The Next Step

By Tim Cooney

This summer, I read the books that some say made the modern memoir genre what it is today: The Glass Castle, Educated, On the Road, Beautiful Boy, Wild Games, Born to Run, Just Kids. Books that don’t just tell a story. They cut through you, define a generation, or reshape the one that came before it.

As each book transitioned into the next, I saw myself and my story reflected in each of them in different ways; it was a little unsettling. I then had to ask myself honestly: Where does my story belong?

Without an agent, I asked ChatGPT to compare Taking the Helm to these other books, and this was the response I got.

The Journeyman shares common literary arcs as:

• Born to Run, a working-class American saga about ambition, identity, and reinvention through music, writing, and a creative journey.

• The Glass Castle, exposes a chaotic childhood with raw vulnerability—and the miracle of what grows from it.

• Educated, chronicles the tension between inherited belief and hard-won truth.

• On the Road, a multi-year journey across America and Ireland in search of meaning and escape.

• Beautiful Boy, reckons with addiction and the helpless love of a parent trying to save a child.

• Just Kids, a love letter to the healing powers of the arts, to becoming, and to the people who saw us before we saw ourselves.

In addition to what Chat GPT had to say about where The Journeyman stands compared to these great books, Taking the Helm - Compass and Tides is also a uniquely grand American adventure and timeless love story that straddles the millennium, bearing witness to the most dramatic and dynamic periods in world history.

The answers from ChatGPT were both humbling and clear: they capture the essence of those stories while offering a new way to experience memoir through prose, music, film, and art. Rooted in five generations of storytellers — from Ireland to Boston to California — my life has included intergenerational trauma, family addiction, mental health challenges, personal crises, incredible success, reinvention, and rediscovered love.

Taking the Helm is its own voice—rough-cut, tender, relentless. Told in prose and song and painted across canvas and page. It is a soundtrack. A painting. A prayer. A story of lives fully lived straddling the millennium.

I’m not just releasing chapters. I’m releasing an entire multimedia archive—a body of work spanning six decades. Memoir, soundtrack, visual art, archival film footage from the 1930s through 2000s, and hundreds of recorded performances—all from one life, lived long enough to tell the whole story - so far. The goal is to release the soundtrack first, followed by the memoir.

A Critique of The Journeyman

At 115,000 words, Taking the Helm is a memoir of rare scope—part personal odyssey, part cultural time capsule. Like Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, it pulses with the beat of a musician’s journey, tracing the way art becomes both a compass and a lifeline. Like Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, it lays bare a turbulent childhood in which resilience was forged in the shadows of instability. Like Tara Westover’s Educated, it’s a story of self-invention against the odds, driven by an unshakable hunger for knowledge and truth.

But Taking the Helm doesn’t stop where most memoirs do—it threads together multiple arcs that could each stand on their own. There’s the lost-love-refound story with Cindy, echoing the emotional punch of Patti Smith’s Just Kids in its intimacy and artistic kinship. There’s the intergenerational lens, with Irish roots and a dramatic upbringing that shaped, and at times haunted, the narrator’s choices. There’s the deeply human account of parenting through chaos, including the bond with grandson Mason—a relationship that reframes legacy as something living, not just inherited.

Like David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, Taking the Helm confronts the pain of addiction in those we love, yet it refuses to live in despair. Every chapter is underpinned by reinvention—the willingness to start again at 60, to reclaim art, music, and truth as both vocation and salvation. It’s an American story in the truest sense: a restless journey across landscapes and decades, asking the question, “Is it ever too late to begin again?”

What uniquely positions Taking the Helm in today’s market is its multimedia depth. The companion soundtrack—24 original songs across two volumes—serves as an emotional echo of the book’s themes, just as Springsteen’s live shows deepen the experience of his writing. The paintings, photography, and stage show concept expand the work into fine art and performance, giving it multiple points of entry for audiences and investors alike.

At its heart, Taking the Helm is a memoir that speaks directly to those who have been knocked down and got back up—not once, but many times. It belongs on the same shelf as the great modern memoirs, but it also belongs on stage, on screen, and in the headphones of anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting over.

Where the Project Is Now

In recent weeks, Taking the Helm has entered an active querying phase with top-tier literary agencies. I’ve already received thoughtful responses from Margaret Riley King at WME and Lauren Liebow at Aevitas Creative Management—both passing on the project but offering warm, encouraging notes that affirm its value and market potential. In publishing, these are not simply rejections; they’re signs of traction. When experienced agents take the time to respond personally, it’s proof that the work is being read, considered, and respected.

While the query process continues, the project’s multimedia wings are already taking flight. Both volumes of The Journeyman soundtrack are live on Bandcamp, with a biweekly single release schedule rolling out on Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms through DistroKid. Each release is paired with a Substack feature that connects the song to the memoir’s deeper story, creating a bridge between readers and listeners.

The visual art that threads through the book will also be available—paintings, photography, and prints—alongside the music, expanding The Journeyman into a collector’s experience. This multi-format approach isn’t an afterthought; it’s the DNA of the project. The book stands on its own as a literary work, but it also lives as an album, a gallery, and a performance.

The next step is clear: finding the right agent who can see the entire scope of this vision and has the relationships to place it with a publisher ready to embrace its cross-medium potential. The Journeyman isn’t just a memoir—it’s an American classic in the making, with a soundtrack ready to play and a visual story ready to be seen.

🎧 The Soundtrack: The Journeyman Vol I & II

Each volume of The Journeyman soundtrack mirrors a distinct part of the memoir.

Volume I: With the exception of “I Had A Boy,” all songs were written in 2023-2024 in California. Many of the songs were written and then performed at local venues in Marin and Sonoma. The songs are a mix of looking back while moving on and being available enough to claim my story.

Volume II: A Mix of songs from different periods. A return to love, to truth, to self. Four songs were written between 2020 and 2022 during COVID, three songs pre-COVID, and five songs post-COVID.

🎵 The Journeyman, Volume I: Reckoning and Revelation

1. You’ve Got This – 2025- A comeback anthem for anyone who’s ever started over or is just beginning.

2. Life is a Journey (Don’t You Know) – 2023- A song about starting out with nothing but finding everything.

3. When Stars Collide – 2023- A cosmic meditation on timing, discovery, and fate.

4. Folk Singer – 2024- A nod to the troubadour life and the search for voice.

5. Home Again – 2024- The uneasy joy of returning to familiar ground.

6. I Had A Boy – 2021- A father’s haunting lament about addiction and grief.

7. I Just Don’t Care – 2024- A playful anthem of emotional release and awareness and not caring what other people think

8. I Wrote It All Down for You – 2025- Discovering through song what words couldn’t hold.

9. Love So Good – 2023- The sudden realization that Love is a real thing!

10. My First Wish – 2025- A father’s reflection on their child's journey.

11. Dream Makers, Chain Breakers – 2025- A generational anthem of healing and rebirth.

12. Acorn Sprout – 2023- A tender story about seeing and being yourself told from a tree’s perspective.

🎶 The Journeyman, Volume II: Healing and Homecoming

1. Just Who You Are – 2013- A gentle hymn of self-awareness, recognition, and acceptance.

2. Black Sheep Returns – 2025- No longer a prodigal son - an anthem for those who wandered far from the flock.

3. What I Don’t Know – 2021-A song about loss in the face of love.

4. She’s An Angel – 2011- Facing one’s limitations in the presence of an unearthly and flawed being.

5. Right In Front of Me – 2020-A realization that the truth is never far.

6. Time to Get Wise – 2023- A life lesson and reminder to open your eyes.

7. Transcend You, Transcend Me – 2020-A prayer wrapped in a song of surrender.

8. I Met a Girl – 2021- The girls we meet that teach us about love.

9. Back for Me – 2024- A song of joyful reconnection and belonging

10. Kickin’ Round With You – 2023- Hand in hand joy, simplicity, and presence.

11. Ninja Boy Quest – 2025- A playful ode to grand-fatherhood, determination, and imagination co-written with my grandson, Mason.

12. Willy Dog –2021- A tribute to the dog who walked beside me through it all.

✨ What’s Next: The Book and the Journey Ahead

Over the past year, I’ve been walking the long road of bringing The Journeyman to market—a process that’s equal parts persistence, patience, and learning to live in the in-between. Finding the right literary agent is not a straight line; it’s more like a relay, where each conversation and query is a handoff that gets you closer to the right partner. Along the way, I’ve refined the manuscript, built out the companion soundtrack, and developed the broader vision for this project as a multimedia offering. Each query is a lesson in timing, positioning, and how deeply you have to believe in your own work to keep sending it into the world.

Two more responses came in this week—thoughtful, gracious notes from Margaret Riley King at WME and Lauren Liebow at Aevitas Creative Management. Both stepped aside, not because they doubted the work’s merit, but because they recognized that it deserves an advocate whose vision fully aligns with its scope. That, in itself, is affirming. It tells me the manuscript is breaking through gatekeeper walls and landing on the desks of top-tier agents. The Journeyman isn’t just a 115,000-word memoir—it’s the centerpiece of a living, breathing multimedia project. Alongside the book are 24 original songs released in two volumes, each track a narrative extension of the memoir’s arc; a gallery of paintings and photography; and a stage show concept combining readings, live performance, and visual art. The next step is clear: to find the right agent who can see the book, the soundtrack, the art, and the performance as one cohesive cultural offering—a once-in-a-generation project that can move across publishing, music, fine art, and film.

The soundtrack is live on Bandcamp for early followers.

Substack subscribers can click the links below to buy or share the albums and subscribe if you’re not already a subscriber.

All I need now is you.

🎧 Follow me on Spotify to catch every new track as it drops bi-weekly
💿 Buy or share the full album above and support this journey directly
📚 Follow The Journeyman, by subscribing to this newsletter or via the Bandcamp merch page
📩 Drop your email below to receive:

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This week’s release streaming everywhere: Kickin’ Round With You and Just Who You Are

🎵 Kickin’ Round With You

An easygoing love song for wanderers, daydreamers, and those who know it’s not the plan that matters—it’s the company.

"Kickin’ Round With You" is a sun-drenched stroll through the kind of love that doesn’t need proving. It’s spontaneous, unfussy, and full of quiet joy—the kind of relationship where just being together feels like enough.

The lyrics unfold like a lazy day in San Francisco: walking across the Golden Gate, heading to the beach, wandering into a party where you don’t know a soul—but it doesn’t matter. You’re with your person. That’s the whole point.

The song’s groove has a laid-back Americana vibe, built on a jangly E–A–D progression that bounces along like worn sneakers on a sidewalk. There’s a bit of Van Morrison looseness, a hint of Buddy Holly innocence, and the kind of heartland optimism you’d find in early Springsteen—but it's all filtered through your signature warmth.

By the time the final verse lands—"And when the day is over, and all the kickin’s through / We wind up back at my place, I’m kickin’ back with you"—you realize this song isn’t just a portrait of young love. It’s a tribute to lasting love. The kind that sneaks up on you when you’re not chasing it.

Perfect for late summer evenings, long drives, or anyone lucky enough to be "kickin' round" with someone who gets it.

Kickin Round With You

Tim Cooney

March 3,2024

E A D A

Every day I wake up

I’m wondering what to do

I don’t have to think too hard

I’m kickin round with you

You just show up at my door

With a plan for two

I’ll just grab my coat and my hat

I’m kickin round with you

Chorus:

E A D A

Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin round with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin round with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to do is kick around with you

With you with you

yeah kickin round with you

We head off down the street

I’ve got my walking shoes

I always have a good time

When I’m kickin round with you

We walk off over golden gate

On a day in blue

The sun is always shinning

When I’m kickin round with you

Chorus:

Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin round with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin round with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to do is kick around with you

With you with you

yeah kickin round with you

We head off to the beach

I’m taking in the view

There’s no place I’d rather be

Then looking right at you

Whenever we’re together

Doing what we do

There’s no where I’d rather be

Then kickin round with you

Chorus:

Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin round with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin round with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to do is kick around with you

With you with you

yeah kickin round with you

We wind up at a party

There’s no one there we knew

It doesn’t really matter

Cause I’m kickin round with you

And when the party’s over

And we don’t know what to do

I put just your hand in mine

I’m kickin round with you

Chorus:

Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin round with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin round with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to do is kick around with you

With you with you

yeah kickin round with you

There are times when I think

If she only knew

But then again, I realize

How much you love me too

Sometimes I forget

And I begin to stew

But then you always come

To my rescue

Chorus:

I’m Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin round with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin round with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to do is kick around with you

With you with you

yeah I’m kickin round with you

And when the day is over

And all the kickins through

We wind up back at my place

I’m kickin back with you

Chorus:

Kickin, Kickin I’m kickin back with you

Kikin, kicken I’m Kikin back with you

I don’t really care if you know it’s true

All I ever want to be is kickin back with you

With you with you

Just you

🎵 Just Who You Are

A battle cry for the quietly brave—the ones finally ready to stop performing and start becoming.

“Just Who You Are” is a soul-charged anthem for anyone who’s ever felt silenced, stranded, or small—and dared to believe there’s more waiting on the other side of fear. From the first verse, it speaks directly to the kid who had no voice and no say, the young adult pushed out too far too soon, and the older self who now knows: healing starts with telling the truth.

The lyrics walk the line between reflection and revolution. They acknowledge how life wounds us—but never let those wounds define us. Instead, the chorus kicks in like a rising tide:
“Be who you are… Don’t waste your time playing a part.”

The sound is rooted in folk-rock and gospel-inflected soul, with a chord progression (Bbm–D–G) that rises and falls like a breath. It's a melodic invitation to throw off the script, stop trying to be "enough" for others, and reclaim your own rhythm.

Lines like “It’s not easy being yourself / It’s even harder being someone else” land with the clarity of lived truth. But it’s the final call—“Let the world see just who you are”—that turns the song from reflection to action.

If “Kickin’ Round With You” is about loving another, this song is about finally learning to love yourself.

Perfect for anyone on the edge of reinvention—young or old, broken or rebuilding—this one’s for the survivors who never lost their way, just needed to remember it.

Just Who You Are

Written by

Tim Cooney

2013

You came to life in the usual way

You had no voice, you had no say

You were like a ball of clay

But that's not who you are today, oh yeah

When you grew up, there was no silver spoon

You grew up fast, and you felt marooned

You were out on a limb too far

But that's who you were and not who you are

Not who you are

Chorus:

Be who you are x4

Don't waste your time playing a part

Be yourself, take a shot

Don't be afraid of what they say

People do that when they lose their way

They lose their way....

Don't lose your way...

Don't lose your way oh yea x2

Break out of that prison cell

The scars you bear, you were them well

Don't let them say you won't go far

because inside, you know just who you are

Just who you are...

Be who you are...

You're who you are, oh yeah

That's just who you are, oh yeah

Chorus:

That's just who you are x4

It's not easy being yourself

It's even harder being someone else

When you're half you can't be whole

So look into the depth of your soul

Down to your sole....

I know it's sounds simple but it's true

it's not what you say but what you do

Find your way back to your star

let the world see just who you are

Who you are

Be who you are

Chorus:

That's just who you are oh yea

just who you are x4

👇 Leave your email & join the journey below:

This isn’t just my story. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered:
Is it too late to begin again?

“It’s in your hands and within your reach, if you just practice what you preach.”

– Tim Cooney
sunturtlestudios.com
thejourneyman.substack.com
timcooney@sunturtlestudio.com

The Song, Story, Video, and Painting

By Tim Cooney
July 2025, Petaluma

"If they’re hungry, we feed them. If they’re scared, we comfort them. If they’re lonely, we cuddle them. And when they leave us, we grieve like we’ve lost a part of our soul. Because we have."

Tim Cooney 2025

From The Journeyman

I lost Willow last week.

She was my dog. My shadow. My road warrior. My healer.

Willow, a 12-year-old Cockapoo, was there for me through everything—divorce, the pandemic, my son’s addiction and mental health crisis, and many heartbreaks and some healing. When I didn’t know how to move forward, she did. She nudged me toward the light. It was Willow who made me decide to drive cross-country to reunite with Cindy in California after thirty-eight years. Willow was too big for a carrier, and I wouldn't put her in cargo. So we decided to drive. After thirty-eight years, Cindy and I would reunite for another cross-country road trip, and Willow would bring us together for that trip. We were three hearts in one car for 3000 miles and nine days, Cindy, Willow, and I. And by the time we reached Petaluma, we were road-tested best of friends.

That trip was a significant part of my reinvention. Willow helped make it possible.

I wrote the song “Willy Dog” in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. Many people adopted pets during the pandemic, but Willow had already been with me for seven years. She came with me after my divorce in 2017. It seemed like it wasn’t even a question as to who Willow would stay with. Of all the things we argued about, Willow wasn’t one of them. She was my dog, and everyone knew that. I wrote the song as a way to express my gratitude to Willow for sticking with me through everything. She was there before, during, and after my whole life changed, and through it all, she was the friend I could always count on, not only to comfort me but also my kids, and especially Cindy and her son’s. Willy helped two families that needed healing. I don’t know how dogs do that, but that’s what makes them so important. They have a way of uniting us around them.

At a time when I was under fire from all directions, and everything was changing, Willow was a constant source of love and affection. When times got lonely, she was always there to remind me I wasn’t alone. She showered everyone she met with love, making every new person and new day a fun experience. She brought out the best in people, including me.

I lost Willow after she suffered a long respiratory illness. She was the runt of her litter and struggled with shortness of breath her entire life. It was a fluke she lived, and we got her when we did. This little pup was going to stay with the breeder due to her frail health, but she had an incredible personality and fighting spirit, so the breeder decided to place her with the right family, and they picked us. She was offered to us after we met with the breeder, and she explained her health issues. We knew of her frailty, but couldn’t resist her sweet personality. Willow was born on July 22, and eight weeks later, on September 22, we picked her up; it was my 52nd birthday. We were connected in a special way, and she made it clear right away who she wanted to be her forever person.

I put together this video last week after Willow passed, featuring my original song ‘Willy Dog.’ You can find it on my SoundCloud and Spotify pages soon. It’s a small tribute to a friend who gave me all they had for twelve years. I know how many of you have pets, and how much they bring to our lives. Enjoy every minute you get with them; they keep things real and remind us to honor ourselves by honoring our loyalties to others. I hope you enjoy my tribute to my friend, Willow (Willy), who passed away on 07/14/2025.

Willy Dog

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🎧 Listen to the track:
🎵 Willy Dog – by Tim Cooney

🎶 Willy Dog – Lyrics and Song by Tim Cooney

I got a friend who sleeps like a log
She don’t say much and she croaks like a frog
She’s my Willy,

My Willy, Willy Willy dog

She’s friendly with the squirrels and chases them a lot
She never catches them, but gives it her best shot
That’s my Willy,

My Willy, Willy, Willy Dog

She’s always with me wherever I go
Out in the wind, the rain and the snow

I’m with Willy

My Willy Willy dog

I’ll tell you one thing that I know is true
Nobody loves me like you-know-who
Like Willy, my Willy Willy dog

She doesn’t like other dogs she just needs her own space
She barks and growls and gets in their face
But that’s just Willy,

Willy Willy Willy Dog

But she loves all the people whoever you are
She’ll make you feel like you’re a rock and roll star

If you go for a ride she’ll just jump in your car
That’s just Willy,

Willy Willy Willy dog

Willy always greets you when you come to my door
She barks a lot but loves you even more
That’s Willy, Willy Dog

When she barks all the time I don’t know what to do
She looks really cute but if you only knew
About my Willy, you’d love her too

That’s just Willy

Willy Willy Willy dog

I feed her dinner and she gobbles it up
She’s twelve years old but still acts like a pup
She’s my Willy, Willy, Willy Dog


She’s always with me wherever I go
Out in the wind, the rain and the snow

Where always together

Don’t you know

I’m with my Willy

Yeah, Willy, Willy Willy Dog

She’s my Willy, Willy Willy Willy dog

Every night when I lie down to sleep
Willy’s always there, lying at my feet

That’s just my Willy dog

She snores just a little

But hardly make a peep

I pray to God her soul to keep
Keep my Willy,

My Willy Willy Willy dog

I’ll tell you one thing that I know is true
Nobody loves me like you-know-who
Like my Willy, my Willy Willy Willy Dog

Like My Willy, Willy, Willy Dog…

She’s My Willy Willy Willy dog

Every night when I lay down to sleep
Willy’s always there lying at my feet

That’s just my Willy dog

She snores just a little

But hardly make a peep

I pray to God her soul to keep
Keep my Willy,

My Willy Willy Willy dog

I’ll tell you one thing that I know is true
Nobody loves me like you-know-who
Like my Willy,
My Willy Willy Willy dog
My Willy Willy Willy Willy dog

My Willy Willy Willy Willy dog

Painting by Tim Cooney

Willow, (Willy Dog) - 07/22/2013 - 07/14/2025

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🐕 A Lifetime of Dogs

Willow was my eighth dog. Each one brought joy and stability, but also a lot of work and worry. They anchored my life through chaos, brought me back to myself when I was adrift, and always reminded me to honor the simple things in life, like a walk in the woods with a beloved friend.

In The Journeyman, I wrote about my first dog named Smokey, who used to run alongside my bike while I delivered papers:

“Every afternoon, Smokey would be waiting for me at the bus stop. He’d trot beside my bike silently as I delivered my newspapers, veering off only to chase a squirrel, investigate a trash can, or run interference on an advancing combatant before rejoining me. He was like a little sentry—half-wild, half-mine. Kids in the neighborhood began calling him ‘Super Smokey. ’ He gave me a kind of invisible armor. I wasn’t alone out there anymore.” I was part of a team!

And about the stray dogs of New Bedford:

“New Bedford was full of strays—dogs without collars, without homes, and without fear. They roamed in loose packs near the harbor and railroad tracks, eyes sharp, ribs showing. I felt more kinship with them than I did with most people at the time. They were survivors. Ragged, neglected, but still determined to live on.” They befriended me, and over the years, I came to know each of them as an individual.

They taught me how to survive. How to find love. How to come back.

💌 Thank You

When I posted about Willow on Facebook, I was overwhelmed by the response—so many hearts, kind words, memories shared. More reactions than any post I’ve made, except those about my son Ben. Thank you. Truly. I know so many of you have loved and lost a dog, too. I understand what you went through. I honor it.

• Smokey: 1971 to 1981

• Buddy: 1980 to 1992

• Donovan: 1992 to 1995

• Patches: 1992 to 1995

• Molly:1995 to 2005

• Shadow: 2005 to 2015

• Willow: 2013 to 2025

• Lexie: 2015 to present (Lives with my daughter, Grace). I bought her just before the divorce, which is why I was able to keep Willow. She made the separation easier for my twins and did what dogs do best: love us. Thanks, Lexie.

• Kirby: 2015 to present

🐾 One More Walk

We still have Cindy’s nine-year-old Jack Russell, Kirby, and I’m grateful. But Willow was my final chapter in a 50-year journey with dogs. I’ve fed them, walked them, healed them, and mourned them. And I’ve been made whole by every one of them.

My days of dog parenting are winding down. But I am—forever—better for it.

With love and thanks,
Tim Cooney
SunTurtle Studios, Petaluma

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Excerpt from the Journeyman

by Tim Cooney

Born in the Sixties

The year I was born (1961) was also the year John Kennedy was elected President of the United States. A native son of Massachusetts, he, along with his brother Bobby, inspired a generation and championed the civil rights movement. By 1963, Jack Kennedy would be gone, assassinated in Dallas, Texas, as hate eclipsed hope. But in his short time in office, he would save the world from possible nuclear destruction during the Cuban missile crisis and set the audacious goal of putting a man on the moon by 1969, changing American history and culture in profound and unpredictable ways.

I remember my mother gathering us around our black-and-white television in July 1969 and telling us that we would want to remember what we were about to witness. A man indeed reaching the surface of the moon and planting an American flag there, declaring, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong had claimed the moon for America. I was fascinated and would pore over the images in Life magazine in a few weeks. The future was wide open!

Equally important culturally in the 1960s was the start of the “British Invasion,” a term used to describe the bands that were coming to America with their version of a new kind of music called Rock & Roll. Nineteen sixty-one was also the year the Rolling Stones were founded, but The Beatles, of course, were the main band of that time. Countless other bands followed them, including The Kinks, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, The Hollies, The Who, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and so many more. This music shaped my young life and inspired me to pick up a guitar at the age of ten and start playing Rock and Roll music."After 1961, the year I was born, the country would never be the same.”

🇺🇸 Another Decade: A Song for the American Soul

By Tim Cooney

“I was born in ’61—the year of the Kennedys—my native sons...”
— from Another Decade

July 4th has come and gone, but our search for personal independence never ends.

Where are we headed?
What did we become?
And what, if anything, is left of the dream?

As America approaches its 250th birthday in 2026, I’ve been thinking not just about patriotism, but about memory, legacy, and the decades that shaped us. This video for Another Decade is more than just a visual companion to a song—it’s a time capsule. A reckoning. A reflection on what was, what could’ve been, and what still might be.

From the promise of the Kennedy era to the chaos of Kent State, from the Beatles and the Stones to the silence left by Cobain, this song—and this video—traces the arc of a generation raised on hope and hardened by history.

It’s the soundtrack of an American experiment still in progress. And it’s deeply personal, filled with the rebellious spirit of a nation in search of itself, just like you and me.

Set against the backdrop of Tim Cooney’s original song, this visual journey chronicles the cultural, political, and personal tides of the Baby Boomer era. With archival imagery, haunting lyrics, and flashes of hope and heartbreak, Another Decade isn’t just a retrospective—it’s a reckoning with time, change, and the question: What did we become, and what did we leave behind? And how did I claim my personal independence through it all?

🎥 Watch the Video: Another Decade"A haunting musical journey through the decades that shaped a generation—set to Tim Cooney’s original song, Another Decade.

A companion piece to The Journeyman, this video honors the soundtrack of a generation—one that played through our radios, our revolutions, and our reinventions. This is the first of the videos that I will create over the next year, inspired by the songs of The Journeyman.

Subscribe to stay informed and never miss them as they are released each month.

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Another Decade is part of The Journeyman soundtrack—a 2-volume album that spans a lifetime of reflection and reinvention.

Link to the song Another Decade and The Journeyman Soundtrack Vol I and II. Click on my name in the Soundcloud link above to view the entire soundtrack to the memoir.

(Vol. III is still in production.)

Why I’m releasing the soundtrack now.

The Journeyman memoir and Journeyman Soundtrack are my attempt to map those decades and tell the story of how a Massachusetts kid with a pawn-shop guitar and dreams of being a storyteller navigated assassinations, turbulent cultural shifts in music and art, a nation’s lofty dreams of conquering the stars, the Woodstock generation, and a dysfunctional family to find himself after decades of searching.

If you came of age when a record needle dropping onto a spinning piece of vinyl felt like church, this memoir is for you. If you’re younger, welcome to the origin story of the playlists you now listen to today on Spotify and Apple Music. Whether you grew up on vinyl or streaming your music, either way, may my memoir—and the soundtrack that accompanies it—remind you that history isn’t just studied; it’s lived, heard, painted, photographed, written, and created, day by day by you and me.

The sixties and the twentieth century may have ended, but the echoes are still alive in all of us, and The Journeyman project tells that story.

Tim, 1976, The Bicentennial of America. Coming of age alongside my country. Seeking my independence through song and story,

🎵 The Journeyman Soundtrack Vol I

“The Road Begins” (A Chat GPT review)

Vol I, is the sound of awakening. These songs trace the early arc of The Journeyman, where dreams are raw, heartbreak is fresh, and every lyric feels like a footstep forward into the unknown. Written across decades, this volume captures the spirit of leaving home, chasing love, losing faith, and finding the will to rise again. There’s a weathered innocence here—acoustic warmth, lyrical honesty, and echoes of the singer-songwriter era that raised us. From backroad Americana to soul-searching ballads, this collection lays the foundation for a life in motion. It’s for anyone who ever left, wandered, and still believed something beautiful was waiting.

🎵 The Journeyman Soundtrack Vol II

“The Reckoning & The Return” (A Chat GPT Review)

If Vol I was the journey outward, Vol II is the reckoning within. These tracks hold the weight of lived experience—the lessons, losses, and luminous moments that come only with time. Here, the voice grows deeper, the themes more layered. Love is no longer just a longing—it’s hard-won. Regret becomes reflection. Joy arrives not as a flash, but as a quiet, knowing presence. The production leans more cinematic, with electric touches, richer arrangements, and melodies shaped by resilience. Vol II is the sound of coming home—not just to a place, but to your true self.

As we look toward 2026 and America’s 250th birthday, may we remember the music, the madness, and the meaning of those early experiences. This country was built on stories and a collective Declaration of Independence. All along the road, I declared mine in big and small ways, and I am sure you did too; it was our birthright. When I left home and family in 1982 at age 21, on a sailboat I had helped build, to seek new opportunities in an unfamiliar place in a distant land, and again in 2013 when I told myself that the success I found as a CFP in financial services, a career I had spent twenty-five years building, felt hollow and what I truly wanted was to be a storyteller. In both those examples, I declared my independence from societal and familial expectations to seek my true calling. When I did that, I was able to find the courage again when it mattered most, in 2022, when I moved to California to chase that dream, and I felt I was finally on the right path to myself.

I would love to hear your stories of when you claimed your independence and how that shaped your journey.

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If my songs and stories resonate with you, share your own story of independence here. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Tim dropped out of school in 1982 and left Newport at the age of 21, seeking independence. He sailed to Florida on a boat he had built with a friend. (Read about the whole adventure and many more in his upcoming Memoir.)

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Then, in 2013, Tim declared his independence again, appropriately in Philadelphia, as he sought his true purpose as a storyteller. (See the whole story in his upcoming memoir)

Tim, pictured here with his life partner Cindy, pays tribute to Jack London at his estate (Wolf House) in Glen Ellen, Sonoma, CA. 2022. Jack London, a legendary American adventurer and writer from Northern California (The Call of the Wild and White Fang), inspired Tim to write his memoir, as they share a history of overcoming great odds to find themselves through their wild adventures, art, and search for truth and personal independence.

Thanks for reading. If this resonated, share it with a fellow Substacker or drop a comment about the songs and experiences that defined your declaration of independence.

New chapters and unreleased tracks land here every Friday. Stay tuned.

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By Timothy Bernard Cooney

Before I knew what a songwriter was, I was already becoming one.

I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon or a studio in my garage. What I had was a damp basement, an early reel-to-reel I received on Christmas when I was nine, and a hunger to understand the world around me. The sound of a needle dropping onto vinyl felt like the truth. The voices that came out of our family’s radio—Dylan, The Beatles, Cat Stevens, Elton John, Carol King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor—felt like my first real teachers.

And more than anything else, they helped me survive.

🎶 Tim Cooney | SunTurtle Studios 🌊🎨
Tim Cooney’s music seamlessly blends soulful storytelling with melodies that resonate with the human experience. His songs reflect a lifetime of experiences, seamlessly weaving folk-rock, indie, and Americana influences into a unique sonic tapestry. Each track resonates with raw emotion, inviting listeners to reflect, heal, and celebrate the winding paths of life. From poignant ballads to uplifting anthems, Tim’s artistry captures reinvention, resilience, and the beauty of starting over. Based in California and backed by SunTurtle Studios, his sound draws from deep roots in family, love, and creative exploration. Expect heartfelt lyrics, captivating acoustic textures, and an authentic voice that lingers long after the last chord fades. Whether you’re looking for music that tells a story or simply lifts your spirit, Tim Cooney’s catalog on SoundCloud offers a soulful escape. 🌟🎸 #TimCooneyMusic #FolkRock

🎵 This Week’s Songs

These three songs—“Acorn Sprout,” “Just Who You Are,” and “Another Decade”—are not just songs. They’re scenes. Prayers. Pages from the memoir I didn’t know I was writing.

🔊 Listen to "Acorn Sprout" Written for my children

🔊 Listen to "Just Who You Are" Written for me

🔊 Listen to "Another Decade" Written for you

🎵 [Listen to all my tracks on SoundCloud] (https://soundcloud.com/timcooney-22)

My SoundCloud page features decades of songs I’ve written, as well as hundreds of covers.

Bonus Track: Folk Singer

🌱 “Acorn Sprout” — Growing in Stillness

This is a song about finding your roots. It may sound like a children's song on first listen—simple, catchy, whimsical. But the truth underneath is anything but childlike. I wrote it for my children so they could see themselves growing like a tree, trying to find themselves in the person they are.

“The summer sun it felt so fine / So I set down my roots, gonna make this place mine.”

That’s what I’ve done, again and again, through life’s fires and droughts. Set down roots.

When I wrote this, I was reflecting on fatherhood, aging, and the cycles that kept bringing me back to love. It echoes a line from The Journeyman:

“I started my first studio in a damp, basement room… It was my sanctuary in our chaotic house. No one would venture in there but me.”

That room was my sanctuary, where I had my record player, reel-to-reel tape recorder, and my dreams. My first little corner of the world where I could grow into myself in peace. Listening to the lyrics of the now classic songs written by teenagers and young people trying to find their voice.

And the chorus?

“I’m just a tree, and that’s alright with me…”

It's not a resignation. Its arrival. It’s standing tall with the bark you've earned on the bluff overlooking your future. In a place you’re rooted.

Acorn Sprout

Written by Tim Cooney 2022

I started out as an acorn sprout The spring came along and I poked my head out The summer sun it felt so fine So I set down my roots, gonna make this place mine I’m just a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah I Grew a couple branches out on my side A real good place for them birds to hide The kids like to play all up in my shade I thought to myself, I got it made I’m just a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah The next ten years went by so fast The present now will soon be the past I kept on growing and I got so tall Then came the drought and I hit the wall I’m just a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah The fires rip through from year to year But I stay safe way up here I was lucky, my roots run deep I pray to God my soul to keep I’m just a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah Being a tree is sometimes rough But you can’t beat the view from on top of this bluff Yeah I’m planted here and I can’t go far But I found my place under these stars I’m just a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah Now I’m the biggest tree in all the land From an acorn sprout in the sand And the people come from near and far Just to see me — I’m a rock and roll star But I’m still a tree, That’s all I’ll ever be I am just a tree That’s my reality I am just a tree, and that’s alright with me — oh yeah

🔥 “Just Who You Are” — Looking into the Mirror and Breaking the Chains

This one hits harder.

It’s for the boy I used to be—the one who stayed quiet for too long. A boy, now a man who thought blending in was safer than standing tall in my truth.

“Break out of that prison cell / The scars you bear, you wear them well…”

The truth is, most of us walk around with invisible chains—expectations, shame, roles we never agreed to play. “Just Who You Are” is the song I wish someone had written for me when I was 19, or 29… or even 49. I wrote this song on a red-eye flight from San Diego to Boston, returning from yet another conference when I was fifty. I was very successful and had built a beautiful family and life on Cape Cod, but something was missing. Perhaps you have felt the same way at times, just wishing to see yourself and that others would see you not for what you are, but for who you are.

It connects directly to a moment in the memoir when I finally began to take the stage of my own life: Seeing myself for the first time as the man I was, not just how others saw me.

“The labels they gave me never fit. The only thing that ever felt true was music—and the sound of my voice learning to listen to itself.”

You can’t fake freedom. But you can fight for it. This song is part of that fight.

Just Who You Are

Written by Tim Cooney 2013

You came to life in the usual way You had no voice, you had no say You were like a ball of clay But that's not who you are today When you grew up there was no silver spoon You grew up fast and you felt marooned You were out on a limb too far But that's who you were and not who you are Not who you are Be just who you are Just who you are Be who you are Who you are Don't waste your time playing a part Be yourself, take a shot Don't be afraid of what they say People do that when they lose their way They lose their way.... Don't lose your way... Don't lose your way Be who you are Just who you are Be just who you are Just who you are Break out of that prison cell The scars you bear you were them well Don't let them say you won't go far because inside, you know just who you are Just who you are... Be who you are... Just who you are Just who you are Be just who you are Who you are It's not easy being yourself It's even harder being someone else When you're half you can't be whole So look into the depth of your soul Down to your sole.... I know it sounds simple, but it's true It's not what you say but what you do Find your way back to your star Let the world see just who you are Who you are Be who you are That's just who you are Just who you are Be just who you are Just who you are

🕰️ “Another Decade” — Watching the World Unfold Through a Guitar and a Song

This song is a history book written in chorus.

“Another decade / Just passing through / Another decade / What will we do…”

I was born in 1961. That means I’ve lived through every moment this song mentions. The Kennedy assassination. The Beatles. Vietnam. Watergate. Lennon’s death. Cobain. The rise and fall of hope, again and again.

The verses trace the decades of my life through the music that scored them:

“Then came the Beatles / And the Rolling Stones / A British invasion, with / Guitars and microphones.”

But it’s more than nostalgia. It’s a lament. A prayer. A warning. A reminder that art—real art—comes from the tension between what is and what could be.

From The Journeyman, I wrote:

“When I was ten years old, the album Dark Side of the Moon came out and I had it on my turntable for my entire teenage experience… I was lying on my bed, with my headphones on, letting those notes take me someplace better, a place unseen.”

Music was never just background noise. It was survival. It was a revolution. It was a revelation.

And in the 1970s, especially, it had a profound impact on me.

“We all felt the world shift that decade. It was sex, it was protest, it was rage, it was love. I learned how to play a guitar, how to make a girl smile, and how to get lost in a record sleeve for hours.”

---

Another Decade

Written by Tim Cooney 2017

Now I was born in 61 The year of the Kennedys’ My native sons They filled our heads With visions and dreams A new generation Things are never what they seem When a bullet rang out In the Texas heat Poor Jack lay dead Right there in the Dallas Street Another decade Just Passing through Another decade What will we do Another decade Just passing by More questions than answers Don't ask me why Then came the Beatles And the Rolling Stones A British invasion, with Guitars and microphones And the civil rights movement Was having it's say But that all ended When someone shot MLK So students were marching They couldn't wait Then Nixon shot four dead At Ohio state Another decade Just Passing through Another decade what will we do Another decade Just passing by More questions than answers Don't ask me why The seventies They started late Then the Beatles broke up Yoko Ono sealed their fate The decade dragged on There was nothing new When we heard Keith Moon died from the Who All the rockers They were at a loss Then time magazine Introduced us to the Boss Another decade Just Passing through Another decade What will we do Another decade Just passing by More questions than answers Don't ask me why Well the Eighties began with a blow Why these things happen, I don’t think we’ll ever know On Monday Night Football Howard Cosell said I hate to tell you but John Lennon he's dead The eighties flew by With little fan fair Except for MTV and Madonna And all that great big hair But the music kept playing When the decade was through They kept on rocking It’s all we could do Another decade Just Passing through Another decade What will we do Another decade Just passing by More questions than answers Just don't ask me why As the nineties began It was all Teen Spirit A band from Seattle You just had to hear it We found Nirvana But it was too late That Rock and Roll curse It Just wouldn’t wait Another decade Just Passing through Another decade What will we do Another decade Just passing by Who will be the next one That has to die

🎸 Becoming the Man the Boy Dreamed Of

I don’t take it for granted that I’m still here searching and finding my voice in the songs I write. I still want to write and explore, from my tape recorder to the tools of AI, utilizing technology that enables me to produce my music in a whole new way. I revisit my lyrics through AI production tools and hear them in a way I could only have dreamed of in the past. The new tracks you hear on my SoundCloud and Spotify channels are my songs, but they were produced using AI tools. In the past, I would have had to assemble a band and spend days in a recording studio, spending thousands of dollars to get the results I can now get in hours. I’ve embraced the tools available to me now, just as I begged my parents for a reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1969, all to help me find my voice and write what I feel so I can share it with you.

I write songs like I wrote my book—with my whole heart, and the soundtrack proves that with every word.

“The greatest journey isn’t a destination, it’s a journey into your soul. To sing out loud even when no one is listening.”

That line from The Journeyman wasn’t just a metaphor. It was my life.

📸 Archive: Roots of a Songwriter

• Christmas 1969: Age 8, (Tim bottom right), with our first toy instruments. The following year, my father bought me a reel-to-reel tape recorder, allowing me to record songs from the radio and begin my musical journey.

• My grandson Mason, age 6, holding his first guitar like it was the Holy Grail

  (My Acorn Sprout) 2024

  

• Tim in high school, long hair, jean jacket, garage band dreams 1976 Age 15

  

• On the sailboat Amy 1982 Guitar in hand age 21

  

• In the studio with Turtleback 2010 age 45

• Performing at the First Night festivities, New Year’s 2015, Sandwich, Massachusetts Age 54

  

• Performing on statge with The SunTurtles 2023 Novato Californis. age 62

Every song I write now carries all these moments. Along with the story of my struggle to find my voice.

That’s the story of The Journeyman!

🧭 Final Thoughts: Sing Anyway

If you’re reading this and wondering if it’s too late for your voice, your art, your truth—let me tell you something:

It’s never too late to begin again. The world needs your story.

Write it. Sing it. Shout it. Whisper it.

But don’t stay silent. Not one more day.

🌐 Connect With Me

I would greatly appreciate all your comments. If you are an agent or wish to discuss collaborations, please email me directly at timcooney@sunturtlestudio.com. I am actively seeking representation for my Memoir, The Journeyman.

https://www.sunturtlestudio.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@timcooneysunturtlestudios

Thank you for walking this road with me.

Sail on, my friends, sail on!

—Tim

Song Description: “I Had a Boy” – Tim Cooney From The Journeyman Soundtrack
This haunting, heartfelt ballad captures the ache of fatherhood when love collides with loss. In “I Had a Boy,” songwriter Tim Cooney traces the arc of a father’s love for his son—from the innocent joy of early years to the heartbreak of watching him drift away. With poetic storytelling and a gentle, folk-infused melody, the song navigates the bittersweet truth that sometimes love alone isn’t enough to save someone. It's a raw, beautiful lament filled with grace, grief, and hope—a tribute to the kind of love that never stops searching. Part elegy, part prayer, this track will resonate with anyone who has loved and lost, but still dares to remember.

A Father’s Song for the One He Couldn’t Save—and the One He Still Can

There’s a chapter in The Journeyman that’s different from all the rest. Not because it’s more dramatic — it isn’t. It’s quieter. Slower. More haunting. It’s the one I could never quite finish, because the story it tells is still unfolding — not in the pages of a book anymore, but in the shape of every day that follows.

He came into the world like most sons do — full of promise. A beautiful child, curious, kind, clever, the apple of my eye. As a young man he grew tall and proud, and I saw the best parts of myself in him. I had hopes, the way any father does. But life took him down a road I never expected and couldn’t always follow.

For years I did everything a father can do except give up. I showed up — in the middle of the night, on the long drives, in the waiting rooms — and I wrote through all of it, because writing was the only way I could keep from breaking.

But this isn’t a story of defeat.

Because there’s a grandchild now. From the moment he arrived, I understood I’d been given something — not a chance to rewrite the past, but a chance to help shape what comes next. Where one generation inherited silence, this one will inherit song. Where there was chaos, there will be safety. Surrounded by family who love him, he is growing up bright and curious and tender-hearted, carrying the best of what came before and none of its weight.

And that’s what The Journeyman is, in its deepest sense: a bridge across generations. A reckoning with what was, and a prayer for what could still be.

In my darkest hours as a father, I turned to music. This song came pouring out in pieces — lines scribbled in notebooks, mumbled into my phone, strummed out when the grief got too loud to ignore. It’s about my son. But it’s also about me — about every parent who has loved a child they couldn’t save, and loved them anyway.

Here’s an excerpt:

I had a boy, what can I say
He came to me in the usual way
I had a boy, where do I begin
I’ve aged fifty years since then
I had a boy... He was my boy.

Sometimes life is such a thrill
Other times it can be a bitter pill
Now I've got a lot of time to kill
Way too much time to kill...
I had a boy.

I had a boy, I wish he had stayed
I hope he finds his way home someday
I had a boy, he lost his will
Sometimes life is just a bitter pill.

This is not a song of blame. It’s a song of mourning—and of hope. It’s about what happens when love isn’t enough to save someone, but still shows up anyway. In the middle of the night. At the ER. On a long drive home. Or in the lyrics of a melody that’s waited years to be sung.

He may never come back fully. He may not see this story the way I do. But the next generation is still becoming, and I will be here — telling the truth, singing the songs, and loving them both.

This is the legacy I offer now—not just as a father, but as a grandfather, a songwriter, and a man who still believes that broken stories can become beautiful songs.

Thank you for listening.

The Journeyman Project, SunTurtle Studios, is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber.

I Had A Boy

Written by Tim Cooney

2020

I had a boy, what can I say

He came to me in the usual way

I had a boy, where do I begin

I’ve aged fifty years since then

I had a boy

He was my boy

I had a boy

He was the apple of my eye

He grew up tall

right by my side

I had a boy

Yeah a boy

I had a boy a beautiful child

Curiouse and kind

and mercy mild

I had a boy

Yeah I had a boy

Sometimes life is such a thrill

Other times It can be a bitter pill

Now I've got a lot of time to kill

Way too much time to kill

I had a boy

I had a boy

He grew up fast

A new generation

but stuck in the past

I had a boy

Yeah I had a boy

I had a boy Where did he go

I didn't see it coming

It was quite a blow

Quite a blow

I had a boy

Sometimes life is such a thrill

Other times It can be a bitter pill

Now I've got a lot of time to kill

Way too much time to kill

I had a boy Where did he go

I didn't see it coming

It was quite a blow

Quite a blow

I had a boy

Sometimes life is such a thrill

Other times It can be a bitter pill

Now I've got a lot of time to kill

Way too much time to kill

I had a boy Where did he go

I didn't see it coming

It was quite a blow

I had a boy, he lost his will

Sometimes life is just a bitter pill

I had a boy always on my mind

That kind of love is so hard to find

I had a boy he disappeared

Like he never knew me,

Like he never cared

I had a boy

I had a boy what can I say

He wandered off

Just like a stray

I had a boy I loved him so

All my love; where did it go

I had a boy

I had a boy Where did he go

I didn't see it coming

It was quite a blow

Quite a blow

I had a boy

Sometimes life is such a thrill

Other times it can be a bitter pill

Now I've got a lot of time to kill

Way too much time to kill

I had a boy

I had a boy a beautiful child

Curious and kind

and mercy mild

I had a boy

Yeah I had a boy

He was my boy

About The Journeyman

The Journeyman is a sweeping, soul-baring memoir of a man who walked through fire and rain to rediscover his voice, his purpose, and his place in the world. Told with the honesty of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the lyrical force of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and the emotional weight of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, it chronicles a life shaped by chaos, saved by creativity, and transformed by love.

Spanning five generations, the book explores the legacy of trauma, the redemptive power of storytelling, and the courage it takes to begin again—again and again. It’s a love story, a spiritual odyssey, and a letter to anyone who’s ever felt like the black sheep in their own family.

This isn’t just a memoir. It’s a reckoning. A reinvention. A revelation.

About the Soundtrack: The Journeyman – Songs from a Life Reclaimed

The companion soundtrack is a 14-track concept album that echoes the memoir’s most emotional moments through a folk rock lens. Think Jackson Browne’s raw intimacy, Bruce Springsteen’s storytelling swagger, with echoes of Kris Kristofferson, Paul Simon, and John Prine.

From the anthem of resilience in “You’ve Got This,” to the heartbreaking elegy of “I Had a Boy,” to the deeply personal legacy songs like “Black Sheep Redemption,” each track offers a lyrical window into the life behind the pages. The music blends Americana, acoustic soul, and singer-songwriter traditions into something wholly original—emotional but never sentimental, grounded yet transcendent.

Every song stands on its own, but together they tell a parallel story to the memoir—a story sung, strummed, and spoken straight from the heart.

If The Journeyman is a book to carry with you, this is the soundtrack to play on the road home.

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My son, and Mason’s Father, Benjamin, my grandson Mason, son Grant Thomas, and daughter Grace Marie

I wrote this song recently for my children…My First Wish.

Your subscription and support will help me continue the journey. Thank you!

My grandson, Mason

Excerpt from the book The Journeyman

Mason arrived on December 15^th, 2018. My son Ben was twenty-two, and Mason’s mother, Veronica, was nineteen. When Ben came to me and told me his girlfriend was pregnant, and asked me what he should do, I told him it wasn’t my decision to make, and I could only tell him the promise I made to myself when I was his age. I believe in life and all the mysteries that surround it, and if I found myself facing an unplanned pregnancy, I would take on the obligation with love, leading me into whatever future we had together by the grace of God.

I’m not sure what effect that had on him and Mason’s mother, Veronica, but we were all graced by the presence of Mason nine months later. At the time he came to me, Ben was doing well. He had tackled some of the bipolar and addiction issues he was facing, and he was holding down a steady job. Nine months later, the couple had broken up, and he slipped back into the depths of addiction and bipolar chaos. Veronica decided she didn’t want to care for the baby, and he was going to be put into foster care. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

Even though I was in the depths of my tragedy with my divorce and worsening health crisis, I sought to petition the court for custody, when the court informed me that Veronica’s mother, Stephanie, who Mason calls Na-ne, had already done so. I offered her my support and told her I wanted to be involved with Mason’s support and care. She picked him up at the hospital with Veronica, and they drove him to my house, where we sat together holding him and beaming with the joy that only a new life can bring.

Stephanie pledged to me that she would make every attempt to include me in Mason’s upbringing, and we scheduled a weekly visit where he spent the day at my home with me, my girlfriend at that time, Stephanie, and her three daughters. Between the three of us, we were raising eight children already, and I had the experience of helping to raise my younger siblings and twenty-one nieces and nephews, so we fell right into a natural rhythm quite familiar.

Mason is a beautiful child, easy-going, curious, and loving. He never cried when he was with me, not even once. I was a proud Papa and thanked God for honoring us by putting us in each other’s lives and bringing hope for the future into view. I knew we were kindred spirits the moment I held him, each needing the other, and it felt like the sun was always shining in the house, no matter what the weather was doing outside. As he grew, the visits continued, and we bonded as only one can with your grandchild. I saw him as a special gift arriving in my life when all else seemed lost or broken.

I knew his journey was not going to be easy with both parents struggling with addiction. His parents were both now on a path of self-destruction as Veronica slipped from being an unprepared young mother to an absentee mother who had abandoned her child, falling into a risky lifestyle with dangerous people and Ben continued to go down a dark road at breathtaking speeds without any guardrails. It was tragic, but through it all, Stephanie, Mason’s grandmother, and I showered our young prince with our unconditional love.

Mason will be seven years old this December, and he has grown quickly into a funny, smart, handsome, compassionate, curious joy of a boy. I see him every week online from my home in California, sharing with him all I know about art, music, and love in our weekly classes. He spends half the year in Florida with Na-ne and his two great-grandmothers. The other half is spent in Massachusetts, and he is home-schooled. He is fully aware of his parents’ challenges. He has an emotional intelligence way beyond his years, accepting them for who they are without judgment, only hoping for their return, taking what he can when he can.

Mason has only received a handful of visits from his father and a few more with his mother over the seven years since his birth, fleeting moments he holds onto that remind him that they are still there, which leaves the door open that one day he might have more of them than what he has now. Until then, he has all of us, his family, by his side. I remind my son every chance I get that Mason, his beautiful son, is waiting for him, and Mason is a warrior of truth and love. I call Mason my Ninja boy for his strength and determination. We wrote this song during one of our weekly meetings to honor that strength and the strength in all of us to claim our rightful place in the world, our home, and sail through the storms that come our way.

Ninja Boy Quest, Written by Tim Cooney and Mason Frazer

For my Ninja Boy and grandson, Mason Joseph Frazer

In the shadow of the night, a hero takes flight,

Ninja boy in black, ready for the fight.

Flashing through the streets, he’s quick as the breeze,

Challenging the darkness, bringing enemies to their knees.

With a heart full of courage, he's got no fear,

Facing off against foes, the victory’s near.

He spins and he kicks, a whirlwind of grace,

In the battle's embrace, he finds his place.

[Chorus]

Ninja boy, rise up, fight through the night,

With every punch and kick, you'll reach for the light.

Victory's a comet, shining so bright,

Ninja boy, keep pushing, you're winning this fight!

[Verse 2]

With the sun rising high, he’s claimed the town,

But the fight’s not over; he won’t back down.

To the next battle, he's ready to soar,

With fists like thunder, he’s hungry for more!

He charges ahead, an unstoppable force,

With each ninja move, he stays on course.

A tank of determination, fueled by his dreams,

In the game of bravery, he's bursting at the seams.

[Chorus]

Ninja boy, rise up, fight through the night,

With every punch and kick, you'll reach for the light.

Victory's a comet, shining so bright,

Ninja boy, keep pushing, you're winning this fight!

[Bridge]

When the battles are won and the dusk settles down,

Home to his family, wearing the crown.

Dinner's on the table, warmth fills the air,

Sharing laughs and stories, love everywhere.

Then the call comes in, a competition's near,

Ten more ninja boys, it's a battle they cheer!

[Verse 3]

They gather together, united they stand,

Brotherhood in action, a formidable band.

Training hard, side by side, pushing the limit,

Each one driven with their own spirit.

And when the fight ends, it’s time to unwind,

For sweet victory waits, with ice cream we find!

[Chorus]

Ninja boy, rise up, fight through the night,

With every punch and kick, you'll reach for the light.

Victory's a comet, shining so bright,

Ninja boy, keep pushing, you're winning this fight!

[Outro]

So here’s to the battles, to the fights that we win,

To family and laughter, let the fun begin!

Ninja boy’s journey is an exhilarating spree,

With ice cream in hand, he’s forever free.

With every new adventure, he’s ready to roam,

A spirit unbroken, in this world he calls home.

Papa Tim, Mason, age 6, Stephanie, Na-ne, 2025 Boston Children’s Museum

Papa Tim and Mason 2020

Grant, Grace, Mason, and Tim in Newport, RI 2024

A montage of Mason growing up with his Papa and extended family, the chain will never be broken!

I’m in Tune, The Who

Your subscription helps me continue the Journey, Thank You!

⛵ Sailing South at 21: A Storm, a Song, and A Prayer
From The Journeyman | Substack Edition #5

On the day I turned twenty-one, I didn’t blow out candles—I cast off dock lines. What began as a voyage down the East Coast from Newport to Ft Lauderdale turned into a trial by wind and water, one that would shape not only my seamanship but my sense of self. It was September 22, 1982, and I was chasing freedom with a tiller in one hand and the songs of my youth in my head.

This excerpt from The Journeyman captures the raw, exhilarating stretch between Newport and Annapolis—a Nor’easter at sea, a lost tender, coffee at dawn in a still sea, and the quiet dignity of surviving something bigger than yourself. It's a young man’s rite of passage told from the helm of memory, soaked in salt and song.

These are the moments that taught me how to navigate storms—on the water, and later, in life. I share them now not just as a sailor’s tale, but as a compass point in the larger map of reinvention this book traces.

Settle in. Smell the diesel. Feel the cold rain on your face. And sail with me back to the beginning.

—Tim

Life is A Journey, Don’t You Know

Written by Tim Cooney

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From the Book, The Journeyman by Tim Cooney

Sailing South on My Twenty-First Birthday

It was finally September 22, 1982, my twenty-first birthday, and the day we agreed would be our departure date. The first leg of our journey would be a nonstop sail down the east coast off Long Island, into Delaware Bay, and down the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis. We left Newport around 1:00 PM. We planned to sail the outside passage off Long Island to Cape May, New Jersey, up through the Delaware Bay. Then we would motor our way through the Delaware/Chesapeake Canal, into the Chesapeake Bay, and down to Annapolis.

On the first leg of the trip, Chris, Amy's captain, and I waited for Chris’s brother Tim and his friend Mark from Idaho to arrive at the boat. They had flown in several days earlier and would accompany us on our sail south. We were all treated to a farewell party at my parents' house the night before our departure. Having an extra crew on board during this maiden voyage was a good idea because we were about to sail into one of the worst storms I would ever encounter in my forty years of sailing offshore.

The day started with much excitement. All the provisions had been stowed, and all systems had been checked and rechecked. The fuel tank was full, the tender was tied up with a double line, and all the crew were on board. My father was in his red flannel Boy Scout jacket, which only the Explorers used. This branch of the Boy Scouts was reserved for only the most experienced scouts.

My dad had worn that jacket throughout my youth, and I always envied the Explorers more than any other scouting group. His arms were crossed as he stood on the dock, watching me while I hurried on and off the boat, making final preparations. I felt that somehow, by crewing on this adventure, I had joined the ranks of the Explorers and had won his respect.

My two younger brothers were watching silently by his side. There wasn’t anything left to say or do, so I cast off the dock line. We waved, slowly motored off the dock, and exited the bay into open water.

The weather radio crackled, and a light breeze was blowing out of the south-east with variable winds and shallow seas. The tender dragged behind us as Newport faded away and Block Island appeared. The island was gone as fast as we saw it, and all we could see after that was a black ocean as darkness fell, and we sailed past Montauk.

It wasn’t long before we were out of sight of land, and the sky suddenly grew darker. The wind began to blow hard while the rain started to fall, softly at first, then harder as we sailed into the storm, and the waves began to swell.

We were about one hundred miles off Long Island when the weather turned vicious and violent. The storm that was supposed to blow out to sea had decided to hug the coast, and we were right in its path. The rain came down in cold sheets, and the waves continued to build as we sailed into the pitch black. The only light was from a small deck light beaming off the mast spreaders.

There was just enough light to see the vast waves approaching us in steady intervals. These were the biggest waves I had ever seen! They were taller than the mast, and as we sailed through each peak and trough, the tender rose on the crest next to me. I could look to my port side and see the tender thirty feet above my head racing alongside me.

As we sailed through the oncoming waves, the tender ricocheted down the back side of the wave as it raced past us. This went on for several hours until the main line connecting the small boat to ours finally snapped under the repeated strikes, and the beautiful dinghy I worked on all summer was lost.

While I was on midnight watch in the pitch-black night, with rain pelting my face and the wind howling in my ears, my eyes witnessed thirty-foot waves roll past me, and I was simultaneously gripped in fear and exhilaration.

To pass the fear, I sang songs in my head. I have always had a knack for remembering lyrics, and my many years of listening to rock music have given me quite an inventory of songs. One of the songs I tuned into at that moment was a Cat Stevens song called “Miles from Nowhere” off the album “Tea for the Tillerman.”

Coincidentally, I was gripping a cold, wet tiller when this song came to me out of the recesses of my mind. As the storm raged around me, I sang, “Miles from nowhere, think I’ll take my time, oh yeah… to get there, look up at the mountain, I must climb, oh yeah, to get there. God, my body has been a good friend, but I won’t need it when I reach the end.”

I have so many songs to turn to when I need them. I was thankful for the music legacy of my youth, which always comforted me in my times of need. Before leaving the dock in Newport, I ensured I had a cassette player installed in the main salon. There was another song I had been listening to all summer from the new Australian band called Men at Work. Colin Hay was a Scottish songwriter and musician. His band had the number one album worldwide in the summer of 1982 with songs like “Who Can It Be Now,” “Land Down Under,” and many others. I was glad to have the Aussies on board.

As my watch ended, it was 3:00 pm; the storm was still raging as Chris poked his head out the hatch and said, “How’s it going out there, Tim?” “All’s well,” I reported, “but I’m ready to get out of this weather.” As Chris made his way out of the cabin, he grabbed the tiller to take his shift. I slid down the companionway into the salon, peeling out of my soaked foul-weather gear, and realized I was soaked down to the skin.

There was no point in finding dry clothing to change into, so I wrapped myself in a wet sleeping bag and lay down in the quarter-berth next to the diesel engine, a Cummings purring along steadily. The engine's purring comforted me as I lay there shivering in wet clothing, wrapped in a damp sleeping bag.

Each wave we sailed through would result in a loud crash that would echo and vibrate through the boat, and there was a sound like you hear when you hold a conch shell up to your ear, but the engine kept on purring, a steady, comforting sound through it all. The white noise was my focus as I sang myself to sleep and thought, “What am I doing here?”

I would get my answer to that question in just a few hours when I would wake to the smell of fresh coffee and the beautiful sunrise off the Atlantic. We would sail past the Manhattan skyline, watching it shimmer to the starboard side as we slowly and quietly motored along the New Jersey Coast on a dead-calm sea as smooth as glass.

The contrast made me breathless as I joined my crewmates in the cockpit. I sipped my coffee, but I had yet to hear a word. We all looked at the skyline on one side and the sunrise on the other as we approached Cape May and sailed into Delaware Bay.

We had just sailed through a monster storm, and I was happy to survive. As we sailed up the bay, we began cleaning up the boat and preparing for the next leg of our journey. We sailed past Atlantic City and up the bay toward Philadelphia.

We reached the Chesapeake-Delaware Bay Canal around 9:00 PM. This was the only transit between the two Bays, and it was filled with cargo ships going in and out of Baltimore and Philadelphia. We were a 36-foot sloop sailing between these 900 to 1500-foot ships in the moonless night. We would sail the Amy alongside one of these monsters and slip into a lock with them. As the water filled the lock, we would rise and fall to the next level with the skyscraper ships next to us.

Looking up from the deck, it was hard to see the tops of the ships, and it felt like we were in a canyon. Their horns blew, metal banging against metal, men’s voices yelling instructions to the ship crew. Water rushed into the locks, then vanished under the boat as we were released from the lock, racing to get out of the path of the great ships as they slowly made their way out of the lock and into the Chesapeake Bay.

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I was on the dock just before departure, and my dad was in his red Explorer jacket with his arms crossed.

I was at the helm on the first leg of the journey just before nightfall, and the Nor`easter hit us off Long Island.

⛵ Final Log: The Storm Breaks, but the Compass Holds

Looking back at these photographs—grainy Polaroids, handwritten captions, snapshots of salt-stained joy—I see more than a young man learning to sail. I see a boy trying to become a man, a dreamer gripping the tiller with a prayer in his throat. From Newport to Fort Lauderdale, from sketchbooks to sea charts, I carried more than gear on that voyage—I carried hope, shame, music, fear, and the first faint shape of who I’d become.

Those memories—of a friend at the chart table, a stranger becoming family, a storm giving way to sunlight—are no longer just mine. I’ve lifted them from their pages and brought them here, to you. And as I share these scenes now, I invite you not only to witness them—but to remember your own crossing. The one that changed everything.

Until the next edition,
—Tim

🧭 Footer

The Journeyman is a serialized memoir by Tim Cooney, author, artist, and founder of SunTurtle Studios. Each post pairs a story with a song, art, and an archive. To hear the music, view the paintings, or dive deeper into the journey, visit:
📺 YouTube Channel

https://www.sunturtlestudio.com.

https://www.sunturtlestudio.com/

Share this voyage with someone searching for their own compass.
Because it’s never too late to begin again.

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“When Stars Collide” is more than just a song—it’s a personal reflection of a love story that spans decades. Inspired by Tim Cooney and Cindy Swanson’s journey of love and destiny, the lyrics evoke the feeling of racing through life’s uncertainties, never knowing exactly when or where a connection will spark. It speaks to those moments when two paths cross unexpectedly, as they did for Tim and Cindy on that fateful train ride.

The train's rhythmic “ clickety-clack “ mirrors the anticipation and pulse built as Tim and Cindy’s worlds drew closer. The song’s themes of searching for a place in the human race and longing for something more reflect the real-life journey of two people finding love and purpose against all odds. Just as their eyes met on that train, and stories were shared through music and laughter, When Stars Collide captures the magic of those rare, serendipitous encounters that change everything.

This song is for anyone who has ever felt love appear like a comet in the night sky—unexpected, brilliant, and unstoppable. The lyrics testify to love’s resilience and the courage to chase what matters most.

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When Stars Collide

Oct/4/2023

Sitting on the track, never looking back

Hear the sound of the clickety-clack

Looking for my place in the human race

It’s never easy when you're being chased

Chorus:

That’s when Stars collide

Bringing us to the other side

Stars they collide

You can run, but you can’t hide

Heading down the line, gonna make this world mine

There’s a girl that I gotta find

She’s been in my head, in all the books I read

Then came the day I found her in my bed

Chorus:

That’s when stars collide

Bringing us to the other side

Stars they collide

You can run, but you can’t hide

You were on my mind when love was hard to find

The world was so unkind, I was starting to unwind

I heard you say you wanted me to stay

And you couldn’t wait, another day

Chorus:

That’s when the stars collide

Bringing us to the other side

Stars they collide

You can run, but you can’t hide

You made me see our love was meant to be

There’s a forest, then a tree, so now you’re here with me

Together, we will stay until that final day

When we fade away into a light display

Chorus:

That’s when stars collide

Bringing us to the other side

Stars they collide

You can run, but you can’t hide

"I Wrote It All Down For You" is a soul-baring ballad that captures the raw emotion of longing, love, and the power of written words. With gentle verses that unfold like journal pages, this song tells the story of a heart compelled to express itself daily through uncertainty and yearning. Every letter and phrase in the lyrics builds a bridge between vulnerability and hope, turning silence into melody.

The song invites listeners to witness an intimate confession, where the simple act of writing becomes an act of courage and connection. Whether longing for brighter days or seeking comfort on the coldest nights, "I Wrote It All Down" resonates with anyone who has ever turned to words as a lifeline, a legacy, and a love letter.

I Wrote It All Down For You

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I Wrote It All Down for You

By

Tim Cooney:

May 2025

I wrote down the things I want to say

I wrote them down day after day

Sometimes I didn't know what to say

But I wrote it all down anyway

I wrote it all down

I wrote it all down for you

I wrote it all, all for you

Every letter, every word, and every phrase

Longing for brighter days

I wrote it all so you would see me here

I wrote it all for you, my dear

You're my novel, my poem, and my song

One day you'll be mine, it won't be long

I wrote it all downI wrote it all down

I wrote down everything I feel

Then it all started to be real

I wrote it down so you could hold it tight

To keep you warm on the coldest night

I wrote it all down

I wrote it all down for you

I wrote it all, all for you

Every letter, every word, and every phrase

Longing for brighter days

I wrote it all so you would see me here

I wrote it all for you, my dear

I wrote it all down

I couldn't wait anymore to say

I would wait here night and day

Then my feeling got stronger

I couldn't hold on any longer

I wrote it all down

You're my novel, my poem, and my song

One day you'll be mine, it won't be long

I wrote it all down

Cindy and Judy on the California Zephyr 1985.

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Here are pictures of Tim in 1985, inside the Airstream trailer he drove from Clearwater to Seattle and in San Francisco before heading back to Florida and meeting Cindy on the California Zephyr.

At my parents’ home in Westport, MA, in 1986, after driving up from Clearwater.

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Tim Cooney Meets Cindy Swanson

From The Journeyman:

She was a rare California beauty who had recently graduated from UC Davis with a master’s degree in early childhood development, traveling with her mom (Judy) from Sacramento to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit her grandmother. Her golden blonde hair matched the golden waves of grass flowing like a river on the California hills just outside my window as we rolled through the valleys just east of Sacramento. With big blue eyes, sun-kissed skin, blonde hair, and a confident smile, she was a young woman with the look of longing, just as I had imagined in my mind’s eye from when I was a teenager.

I was suntanned, my green eyes looking like beacons searching the shoreline for a passing ship. I was a wandering spirit originally from a small coastal Hamlet called Westport in Massachusetts, stuck between two old mill cities: Fall River and New Bedford, the land of Moby Dick and Lizzy Borden. It was a hard, scrabbled place stuck in the past, standing still as the rest of the country leaped forward, and thousands of miles away from the California dream.

I was returning from a cross-country trip, spending the summer on the west coast, and still searching for myself when I found her. I knew immediately there was something special about her when our eyes made contact. We smiled at each other as she passed me, looking for a vacant seat. I took in the view of the countryside as the sun began to set and the train kept rolling into the desert, and thought, that’s a girl I would like to meet.

I settled in for the night in my coach accommodations while Cindy and her mom left for their sleeper car. I waved, deliberately attempted to get her attention as she walked past me a second time, and she smiled politely at me as she left the car.

The next morning, we arrived in Grand Junction, Colorado, for a scheduled stop. I gathered my things and rubbed my eyes as the conductor instructed us that this would be a good place to exit the train and stretch our legs before continuing to Chicago overnight. I didn’t have the nerve to approach the pretty blonde as she exited the train, but her mom (Judy) made a connection with me as we mingled about the station.

Judy approached me, making small talk. She asked me about the guitar I was holding, and we talked about the train, the music I liked to play, and where we were both from and were going. The ice had been broken. I shared stories about my travels over the summer when Judy introduced me to Cindy. Soon, the train whistle blew, and we were all returning to the train for the overnight trip to Chicago.

We exchanged smiles, and Judy suggested we hang out in the club car and share lunch as we reboarded the train. She mentioned that Cindy and I were about the same age and probably had some things in common. I agreed enthusiastically and offered to play a few songs for them with my guitar. I played them the Dylan, Beatles, and Neil Young songs that were part of my song list, which I kept for such occasions. That was the beginning of a relationship that would become the most important one of our lives.

The day passed quickly as we got acquainted and shared our stories. We would be traveling overnight, and after a day of travel, they both retreated to their sleeping cars while I settled into one of the seats in the coach car, where the people who had little money slept. As night fell, I heard the door to my car open and saw Cindy walking toward me with a shy smile; she was beautiful, I thought. She sat next to me and we stared into each other’s eyes while her mother slept. We talked all night, and the sound of the rail cars clickety-clacked along, creating a soothing rhythm as the moonlit night passed outside the broad windows of the train.

As the train kept rolling, we passed through the cities and towns of the Midwest on our way to Chicago. We shared our life stories, dreams, and fantasies as we held hands under the blanket, quietly laughing and smiling, looking into each other's eyes. The conductor passed by every half hour, checking on us to make sure we were behaving. Cindy was twenty-four and six months older than I; I would turn twenty-four in just a few weeks. Our lives were entirely in front of us.

Before we knew it, the conductor announced the approach to Chicago. We would both board separate trains for the remainder of our trips. Before we parted ways, Cindy pulled out a piece of paper from her purse and read it to me:

The Station by Robert Hastings.

Tucked away in our subconscious is an idyllic vision. We are travelling by train, out the windows, we drink in the passing scenes of children waving at a crossing,
cattle grazing on a distant hillside, row upon row of corn and wheat,
flatlands and valleys, mountains and rolling hillsides, and city skylines. But the final destination is uppermost in our minds. On a certain day, we will pull into the station. Bands will be playing, and flags will be waving.

Once we get there, our dreams will come true, and the pieces of our lives
will fit together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. Restlessly we pace the aisles, damning the minutes -waiting, waiting, waiting for the station. "When we reach the station, that will be it!" We cry. "When I'm 18." "When I buy a new 450SL Mercedes-Benz!" "When I put the last kid through college." "When I have paid off the mortgage!" "When I get a promotion." "When I retire, I shall live happily ever after!" Sooner or later, we realize there is no station, no one place to arrive. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly outdistances us. "Relish the moment" is a good motto. It isn't the burdens of today that drive men mad. It is the regrets over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who rob us of today. Regret is reality, after the facts. So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles.

Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, go barefoot more often, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more, and cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. The STATION will come soon enough.

by Robert J. Hastings

It was a profound moment and a sentiment I would carry with me for my whole life: “It’s all about the journey.” That is why I called my memoir The Journeyman.

I wandered around Chicago, waiting for my connecting train. With a few hours to kill, I rode the elevator to the top of the Sears Tower. As I looked out over Lake Michigan, I imagined what my life would be like in the future, not knowing that in a few years, my family would dissolve under a cloud of scandal, and the journey continued.

As I rushed to catch my train for Florida, I boarded with thoughts of Cindy; it was hard to think of anything else. This young, beautiful California girl I had met on a train in Colorado was now in my head, and as the days and months passed, she would soon be in my heart.

Cindy’s Visit and Going Home

I returned to Florida and got back to work. It was the fall of 1985, and I turned twenty-four on September 22. I had already been living in Florida for three years, which began in 1982 in Fort Lauderdale on a 35-foot Sloop I had built with a friend in Newport, RI. We sailed the sloop Amy down the coast, offshore, and along the intercoastal to Fort Lauderdale. We had only a chart and a compass on that journey to lead us. After meeting Cindy in Colorado, I felt the same sense of adventure, but without the benefit of a chart or a compass to lead me.

When I returned to Clearwater in the fall of 1985, Cindy and I immediately started our cross-country relationship. We would write long letters and talk for hours on the phone. Eventually, it was decided that she would visit me in Florida in the spring of 1986, and I began planning a road trip to Massachusetts to introduce her to my family.

She arrived at the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, which was used before all the upgrades at the Tampa airport. It was a short ride from my condo, and the excitement was hard to manage. She was a vision standing there at the gate. Her beautiful California tan, her blonde hair, and her big smile were a welcome sight.

We embraced, and I grabbed her bags. We headed to Clearwater Beach, where we walked along the white sand, hand in hand, talking and smiling. We had dinner on the beach, watching the sun go down over the Gulf of Mexico. I thought I hadn’t been this happy in quite a while.

The next day, we packed our things and prepared to drive overnight and nonstop up the coast to Massachusetts. I was driving a lime-green Buick Century Station wagon. It was several years old but in fine shape, and it made the trip without incident except the speeding ticket I got in Georgia at 2:00 a.m. We arrived safely and were greeted with open arms by my mother and younger siblings. A party was planned, and friends from far and wide attended.

After a week-long stay, Cindy and I drove back to Florida, and during this time, we bonded in ways only lovers do, and I was glad for it. Cindy had shared with me when we met that she had just lost her father several months earlier to a heart attack in a dramatic scene that left her traumatized. I was glad I was there to provide comfort and hope for the future. She would soon return to California, and our letter correspondence would continue for another year while I navigated increasingly dangerous and unpredictable waters.

My older siblings were now raising their young families, but I still had three younger brothers at home. By the summer of 1987, my family was in crisis, which led me back to New England to fulfill my role as the middle child and do what I could to help my parents through their divorce under a cloud of scandal and heartache after thirty years of marriage. This ongoing family drama altered my plans of reuniting with Cindy for thirty-eight years as the journey continued.

A Painting by Tim Cooney

Story Behind the Painting:

The inspiration for this piece is deeply intertwined with Tim Cooney’s life story. It represents the California landscape that accompanied a pivotal moment in his journey—meeting Cindy Swanson, a young woman from Sacramento, during a train ride that changed his life. Their encounter, reminiscent of the gentle and unhurried curves of the hills, symbolizes a profound but long-awaited love. The painting reflects Tim's deep connection to the land of Petaluma, where dreams, memories, and nature itself merge.

This scene becomes a visual metaphor for life’s unpredictable but beautiful path. Much like the rolling hills, Tim's journey has been full of ups and downs, but always under a sky of hope and potential. Cindy's story, whose golden hair mirrored these hills, resonates through the artwork, making it not just a landscape but a love letter to memory, perseverance, and the journey itself.

Tim and Cindy, in Santa Barbara 2023

Last week, I flew from San Francisco to New York City to attend my daughter Grace’s graduation from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is a true fashion designer, whose journey began not in a glossy Manhattan showroom, but in the basement studio I built for her back on Cape Cod.

That basement was more than just a creative space—it was our incubator. I filled it with sewing machines, vintage patterns from estate sales, and hours of encouragement. Her twin brother Grant and I worked on a massive train layout while she stitched her early designs. We were building dreams and breaking chains together.

Grant went on to curate vintage collections and exotic treasures from estate sales across New England, and Grace dove headfirst into sustainable fashion. And together, they now stand at the helm of their futures—independent, imaginative, and deeply rooted in values of creativity and legacy.

The Basement Studios: Where It All Began

In 2015, after being diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia, I began painting. It started in that same basement studio—first boats, then visions, then memories. That creative storm carried me through years of grief, physical pain, and heartbreak. I painted through the loss and emerged into something new.

I’ve now painted hundreds of works, mentored my grandson Mason from afar, and continued to grow SunTurtle Studios into a haven of healing. The basement taught us all how to turn wounds into wisdom.

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Grant Thomas, Graduation from UMASS Eisenberg School of Business 2025

Grace Marie, Graduation from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, Class of 2025

Grace is standing outside the Designer Show at Pratt 2025

New York Walkabout: Dreaming Big with The Journeyman

While in Manhattan, I showed my graduates how to dream big by example. I stepped into Random House and imagined my book being published after going to auction. I stood beneath the lights of Carnegie Hall, dreaming about doing my show there and the Scottish ancestry I shared with the man. I took photos at The New York Times, manifesting that my book will one day be a bestseller. I passed by the Late-Night studios of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon, imagining myself sitting on their couches, talking about The Journeyman. I also visited Strawberry Fields, where I imagined my future like John Lennon had taught me so many years ago, and thanked him for inspiring me and my love of music. All of it in service of a vision I’ve held for decades: that The Journeyman, my memoir and multimedia project, will soon find its rightful audience.

On the plane trip to New York, I watched A Complete Unknown, the Dylan biopic, and wept as I realized our journeys as artists are all the same, a searching. I read Chronicles cover to cover, reflecting on my journey—from a stockbroker to an artist, from codependency to clarity, from chaos to truth. I remembered reading The Secret over a decade ago and realized that I had manifested this moment.

I stopped by McNally Jackson Books and picked up The Glass Castle, Just Kids, Chronicles, Born to Run, and On the Road. Books that share something with my story—truth, survival, reinvention.

Manifesting the future with Grace in Manhattan

By Tim Cooney

I wrote this song for my children—Grant and Grace—who arrived in the middle of a storm, and somehow became the light that pulled me from the darkest years of my life. I named them in a prayer, and that prayer became a path. This song is for them—and for anyone still at sea, looking for the light.

Verse 1

You pulled me out of the darkness and washed away my pain

Two gentle hearts that I named in a prayer’s refrain

You granted me grace when there was nothing there

Gave me a whisper of hope, brought me to where

Loves melody, played softly in the night

Chasing away shadows, you made everything right

What will you become? That’s what I thought

You gave this old soul a brand-new start

Chorus

Dream makers Chain breakers, — I know it sounds strange

Dream makers Chain breakers, — it’s time to change

Dream makers, Chain breakers, — this is your chance

Dream makers Chain breakers, — show us how to dance

Dream makers, Chain breakers, — you're my little prayer

Grant me your grace, and I will take you there

Verse 3

You sailed through the storm with your compass so right

Turning wounds into wisdom, truth into sight

Your light shines bright for those who cannot see

Shining through the darkness and sailing back to me

Each moment with you is like flowers in bloom

Creating a garden that will conquer the gloom

In the silence of the night, when the world feels cold

You wrap me in warmth turning dark into gold

Chorus

Dream makers Chain breakers, — I know it sounds strange

Dream makers Chain breakers, — it’s time to change

Dream makers, Chain breakers, — this is your chance

Dream makers Chain breakers, — show us how to dance

Dream makers, Chain breakers, — Here my little prayer

Grant me your grace, and I will take you there

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---

From The Book, The Journeyman

The Basement Studios

I discovered painting in 2015 after being diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia, and was trying to work through my feelings about the disease. I rediscovered the canvas in a whole new way—not the canvas of my sailboat but a different kind of canvas—a magic canvas that, if in the hands of an artist, can become a window into the world they seek.

It began in the basement with my twins on one rainy summer day. I wanted to teach them what I knew about tools and creative endeavors, so I started putting a studio space together where I could teach them, much like my grandfather had taught me. I could see that my twins, Grant and Grace were enthusiastic children with big ambitions, much like their father.

Grace, a gifted designer and all-around talented creator. I wanted to encourage her as much as possible, so I arranged some sewing lessons for her with a neighbor and built her a studio in the basement, much like I had done for myself as a child. With her grandmother’s mentorship and the sewing lessons, she had all the support she needed.

She now had a place where she could develop her incredible talents. By 2025, she would graduate from the fashion program at Pratt in Brooklyn with honors. I attended the fashion show for the graduating class of chosen designers in May of 2025. I couldn’t be prouder of the artist she has become.

My son Grant was inquisitive and interested in everything I had to teach him to harness that energy, but he had one passion…trains. We would spend the next three years building a vast layout in our basement and hunting for trains far and wide. It was a great bonding experience that I would never forget. I had so many lessons to offer them both, especially in creative design.

When I moved my business back home after my eldest son was diagnosed with bipolar, it was done with intention. I knew these were the final years I would have my twins to myself, and I didn’t want to waste a single minute. I was distraught over my eldest son’s addiction, and I didn’t want my youngest children to have to compromise their childhood to accommodate their older brother’s disease, so I paid special attention to them all during this time and put my business on the back burner.

The first few canvases I painted were of boats; I like boats, and there was something that made me happy when I painted them. Thinking about my sailing voyages opened my memories as I poured them onto the canvas. I was carrying so much emotional and physical pain at the time, I was hooked right away on its healing powers.

I would paint for hours and hours until the canvas grew. I would often get lost in the process, and there would be weeks during those three years when I spent every day painting. I would get lost in a trance starting in the early morning and not looking up from the canvas until late evening.

When I began hanging the paintings in my home, art and music filled my thoughts every day. Together, art and music were my healing elixir, just what I needed to escape the confusion, trauma, and pain that had become my life.

I have been painting for over ten years now, and I have completed hundreds of paintings. I teach my grandson, Mason, art and Music remotely every week from Northern California, where I now live. I credit art and music for helping me heal and reconnect with my authentic self. Art and music have given me the greatest joy, and I began sharing that joy with my children and grandchildren every day. Art saved us, and it can save you too!

My Son and Moon by Tim Cooney

This painting is witness to the trauma that engulfed my home in the summer of 2015. I had just begun my painting journey when my eldest son was diagnosed with bipolar fueld by addiction. The canvas was in my studio on my easel when he came into the house and took a blow torch to it. He burned two holes in the top of the canvas and trashed the studio. His rage shocked us all but I refused to let it win. I patched the holes from behind and turned the scars into the sun and moon living together, the dark and the light in one frame reflecting the bipolar world that now belonged to us all.

I painted my twins walking their path in the distance and leaving the trauma behind. Their bikes a symbol of their vanishing childhood, I played them a song as I sat on my bench as a motivational march forward. The lighthouse on the hill guiding them into the future. In the distance, two boats at sea still searching, my son and ex-wife who are still searching for the light to guide them back from the vast sea of their codependency.

The Journeyman by Timothy Bernard Cooney

A Soulful, Sweeping Memoir of Survival, Artistry, Resilience , Truth and Unending Love

The Journeyman is not just a memoir—it’s an odyssey. Timothy Bernard Cooney delivers a rare, emotionally raw, and richly layered narrative that spans five generations, dozens of cities, and a lifetime of personal reckonings. From the dusty roads of New England to the soul-searching shores of Ireland, to the golden hills of California, Cooney traces the inheritance of trauma, the evolution of identity, and the healing force of love and creative expression.

What begins as a box of letters and family relics turns into a time capsule of a life bravely examined. Cooney’s storytelling is luminous and unflinching. He weaves together personal memories, family scandal, intergenerational pain, and the transcendence of art with the eye of a filmmaker, the heart of a poet, and the grit of a survivor.

This memoir courageously confronts some of the most difficult truths a family can endure: abuse, mental illness, addiction, and betrayal. And yet, through it all, what rises is a son’s love for his mother, a father’s heartbreak for his addicted child, and an artist’s ongoing quest to turn suffering into beauty.

Cooney’s prose is vivid and intimate—each scene alive with detail, every emotion earned. His voice is equal parts elegy and anthem. It’s the kind of book that feels like a conversation with a wise friend at midnight—equal parts confession and revelation.

With original songs, visual art, and archival materials waiting in the wings, The Journeyman is more than a book—it’s a multi-sensory experience and a testament to how storytelling can reclaim a soul and restore a legacy.

Highly recommended for fans of Angela’s Ashes, The Glass Castle, or Born to Run—and for anyone brave enough to believe that love can, in fact, conquer all.

The Box

The box arrived with the day’s regular mail. I pushed aside the bills and advertisements and picked it up, placing it with reverence on the kitchen table. I knew what it was, but didn’t know what was in it. It was 2024, and a year had passed since my mother’s death. She was eighty-six when she passed, and I missed her dearly. I missed her letters the most. Since I left for college in 1980, she had consistently written me with the family news, day’s events, prayers, and observations no matter where my crazy life took me.

When I began receiving them, I decided to save every single letter, card, newspaper clipping, and pile of pictures that she would send me. She always knew the right thing to say when I was going through the many challenges that I faced, and her love was unending. She always tried to make me feel connected to her through her kind words and heartfelt wisdom.

I opened the box, and the first thing I saw was her Bible. It wasn’t just any Bible; IT WAS THE BIBLE, the one I had given her nearly fifty years earlier. It was a significant artifact and a witness to her decade-long devotion to Jesus Christ and the words that were in that book. She reminded me often in her cards and letters just how much the gesture had meant to her in 1978 when I gave it to her for Mother’s Day.

It was a King James version in large print, and as I opened it, I could see how fragile it was from the many years of her carrying it around from prayer meeting to prayer meeting. The margins were filled with her handwritten notes, and it had a custom cover made from gold wrapping paper that held it together. She finished her wrapping by placing a sticker of a red heart right in the middle of the front cover.

As I opened it, it naturally opened to her favorite verse, Corinthians 13:4-8, 13: “Faith, Hope, and Love, of all these things, love is the greatest.” She was so attached to this scripture that she had a license plate made for her that said, Corinthians 13. It was attached to the front of her many cars until she could no longer drive. It was her way of spreading love everywhere she went. She would say it was her mission to do what she could to spread love around the world.

I put the Bible down and looked further into the box. There I found every letter and card I had ever sent her. They were from faraway places that I had traveled, and were short and sweet, but they conveyed a devotion to her that I carried with me my whole life. Then, I saw it - at the bottom of the box, her manuscript. In 1970, after losing her father to a sudden heart attack when he was only sixty-five and nearly losing her own life after birthing her eighth and final child in thirteen years, she began to write her experiences down.

The death of her father was a blow to all of us, especially me. He was a rare man, especially for his time. He was our patron saint, and my family may not have survived without his love and support. I thumbed through the hand-typed pages and could hear the clicking of her Royal Corona typewriter like it was yesterday.

She first wrote the story in many identical notebooks, much of it in shorthand, a skill she learned in secretarial school. I remember seeing them on her desk when I was a child and looking at the strange figures on the pages like they were a secret code only she could interpret.

When she was ready, after taking care of the eight of us and we were all tucked in our beds for the night, she would sit for hours clicking away in her room, typing out her feelings on that typewriter and purging herself so as not to carry them around with her, choosing to leave them on the page instead. It would be a year after her death before I could bring myself to read what was on those pages when they would become part of the source material for this book. It would be a difficult read.

I continued looking through the contents of the box. I then discovered my grandfather’s home movies and converted films from the 1930s through the 1950s, which featured my mother’s privileged upbringing during the Depression and World War II. I remember my grandfather setting up the home movie projector in his basement, where we would visit as children, and watch them over and over.

He would gather his grandchildren all around the small room to see the scratchy images shining out of the lens on the front of the projector as my grandmother arrived with the Jiffy Pop popcorn. There wasn’t any sound coming from the machine, other than the clickety-clack of the projector as the oohs and aahs came from the children. We delighted in the smiling images of my mother’s family as they navigated early twentieth-century New England with grace and humor. They were always dressed to the nines.

I gathered the many artifacts, and I began my journey to learn more. I began sorting through all the notes and letters, re-reading the words we exchanged for years. I digitized the movies and viewed them all, fascinated with the clarity and depth of the collection. I sorted through my own archives and began to put together the story that was her life and now mine. I called the sole remaining witness; her brother now living in Florida and interviewed him. I learned things I never knew and relearned the traumatic family secrets that shattered their seemingly perfect lives. The traumas that would become my own. Then I began to write in earnest as my mother once did, the project that would become The Journeyman.

Opening The Box

An original song by Tim Cooney, The Nest, recorded live at The HopMonk, Novato, California.

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My Mom, Virginia Marie Donohue (Ginny), 1954

Virginia Cooney, (Ginny), the writer 1971

Painting of Roses by Tim Cooney, gifted to my Mom on Mother’s Day 2020.

The Nest, with Randy Doolittle on bass and Dave on mandolin, was recorded

at Mantra Wine Bar, Novato, California.

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Much more to the story below. I would love to have you along for the journey!

The Early Years

As the years go by

A story written by Virginia Cooney. 1969

My mother wrote this story about standing up for me when I was getting bullied after church services when I was an altar boy at St. Luke’s in New Bedford. She was my heroine then and still is.

A note from mom, she would send these every week, sometimes twice a week.

Mother’s Day Card 2013

DEMO, The Nest By Tim “The Nest”

This is the first demo of the song The Nest, I recorded the song in my home in Petaluma CA.

Tim Cooney

Jan 30, 2024

C Am Fm7

So he took a leap

Into the great unknown

He flew around the sun

And he was all alone

He was all alone

He floated on the clouds

Where there was barely a sound

It was quiet up there

And there was no one around

There was no one around

Chorus

C. G. F. G.

I am here where I am

This is me so here I am

It is here I make my stand

This is me, I am who I am

He flew higher still

Trying to reach the stars

They were shinning out there

They couldn’t be that far

They couldn’t be that far

It took all of his will

But then he tumbled back down

What will he do now

Where is he bound

Where is he bound

Chorus

C. G. F. G.

It is here where I am

This is me so here I am

It is here I make my stand

This is me, I am who I am

It grew dark out there

And he was cold and scared

He saw a place he could land

Out by the sea and the sand

Out by the sea and the sand

So he settled down

Where he could be free

He had to find a place

To be what he wanted to be

Be what he wanted to be

Chorus

C. G. F. G.

It is here where I am

This is me so here I am

It is here I make my stand

This is me, I am who I am

Then one day she appeared

They flew around the sun

She couldn’t pass him by

Now the two are one

Now the two are one

So they took a leap

Into the great unknown

They flew around the sun

And built themselves a home

They built themselves a home

Chorus

She appeared where I am

She is here, where I stand

She is here where I am

With her, I am who I am

Thanks you so much for following my story. See you soon!n