The Promise

A song, the opening pages of Taking the Helm, two paintings for your screen — and my promise to you.

You’re here. Thank you — truly.

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