There is a particular quality of light in the desert just before dawn. The sky goes from black to deep blue to a violet that doesn't exist anywhere else — and then the red rocks catch it, and for a few minutes everything is the same warm impossible color, like it's on fire. I've watched that happen more times than I can count, from the window of my warm, homey converted van or shuttle bus, with a cup of something raw and delicious in my hands, and a cat or two rearranging themselves around me.
This is not a fictional story. This is just what mornings looked like for me, for a long time.
My name is Blue Cobalt, and I've been living an uncommon life for as long as I can remember. Not because I planned it that way. Not because I was trying to be different. But because the conventional path never fit — and at some point I stopped trying to squeeze myself into it at all, and started walking the road that was actually mine.
That's what this place is about.
The Name
Blue Cobalt is not a stage name or a brand. It was told to me in meditation in 1992 as my true name by a Celtic Goddess-form I was working with at the time called The Kundry. I knew immediately that it was my name. Not a name I was choosing. A name I was recognizing, remembering.
It is the truest thing I know.
I made it legal when the moment felt right a few years later. That's how I tend to move through things — not on a schedule, not by anyone else's timeline, but when something inside settles into a clear yes or do it now. The name has been mine, in every way that matters, for a very long time.
I tell you this at the beginning because it's the clearest possible picture of who you're dealing with. Someone who takes their own inner experience seriously. Someone who always practices to move by inner knowing rather than external pressure. Someone who is, for better or for worse, exactly who they are.
Everything you find at The Uncommon Road comes from that same place.
The Road — 15 Years of It
In 2003 I gave away all my belongings except what would fit in my hiking backpack, and went to Burning Man with the intention of catching a ride to British Columbia to leave the mainstream world completely, and live my life fully. I did so on a bright red double-decker bus that had been brought over from London, crying myself to sleep in the middle of the night as we departed, and arriving in British Columbia with $30 USD in my pocket, and a heart full of wonder and dreams.
I spent nine months at an intentional community there that completely changed my life forever. That chapter deserves its own telling someday soon. For now I'll say it was formative in ways that are still reverberating — including the fact that it's where my raw food journey kicked into high gear.
When it became time to leave there, I loaded what mattered into a VW Jetta and started moving. I was mainly in Southern California and Arizona for a while — sleeping under the stars in a sleeping bag, camping wherever the night found me, learning what I actually needed and what I'd only thought I did. The answer to that second category turned out to be: almost everything I'd left behind.
I landed in LA for a time, after my computer, video camera, and everything I needed to generate income while on the road was stolen while camping in the desert near Sedona. A past partner offered me a room and space in Venice Beach CA to get back on my feet. I was briefly sucked into the LA whirlwind once again, having lived there for five years previously. So many possibilities of opportunities were arising to help me build my grassroots nonprofit around raw foods and consciousness in LA, but it ultimately wasn't the life I wanted. I chose to move to a small house in the mountains of Santa Cruz for a couple of years, meditate, keep seahorses, and continue doing what I felt drawn to do.
In 2009 I decided to give myself over to a lifelong dream, and purchased a van with a nice raised roof, converted the interior into a home with a bed space, cabinets, and a small fridge, and moved into it. My kitty Gabriella — who had come into my life just eight months before — and I hit the adventures of the road for a long, amazing journey. We covered a lot of ground together in Vanthony — up and down the West Coast, through the Southwest and Colorado, across to Asheville, up to Missouri, and eventually down to the Florida Keys, where I twice spent some magical time camping on Big Pine Key where the wild miniature Key deer are. Times I still dream about.
The van years were the deepening. The life that most people romanticize from the outside, lived from the inside with full commitment and real depth — and real difficulty, and real beauty, and very few of the things people imagine and most of the things they don't.
In 2017 came a 24-foot converted shuttle bus — white, solid, unhurried, and never quite given the chance to tell me its name. We spent time in many of the same places as the van years, plus extended time in the desert outside Sedona. That photograph on the homepage and every one of our socials — the red dirt path, the red rock, the morning sky — was taken during those months. It is not a stock image. It is one of my homes.
Fifteen years. Three vehicles. The same raw food throughout. The same morning practice. The same cat, eventually, and then more cats. The same essential understanding that this was not a phase or an adventure — it was simply how life worked when I was being honest about what I needed.
23 Years Raw
The raw food journey began at that intentional community in British Columbia, and what started there has never stopped.
That was over 23 years ago. I have been 100% raw vegetarian every day since (except an experiment with Italian low heat pasta and raw marinara I'll tell you about sometime) — through car life and van life and bus life and the years in between, through every country and climate and circumstance, through caregiving and isolation and the full range of what a life actually contains. Not because I am rigid about it. Because it works and feels right for me, genuinely and completely, in a way that nothing else I've tried has matched.
I should be specific about what I mean by raw vegetarian. My diet includes two raw eggs every morning, and raw goat cheese alongside the full range of raw plant foods — fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, sprouted grains, fresh herbs, all of it as close to its living state as possible. I am not vegan. I tried being vegan in the beginning, and there was something important missing for my body's health and vitality, which raw goat cheese supplied. Raw eggs took care of a B12 deficiency that methylcobalamin couldn't fix, and continue to keep my B12 levels good, as well as supplying an easy to digest protein, and loads of other vitamins and minerals, in a manner my body looks forward to every morning for 10 years now. Not for everyone. Works great for me.
I have also developed a lot of recipes. And a lot of opinions. And a healthy skepticism of any tendency toward fanaticism and magical claims. What you'll find here is the honest version: what actually works for me, what is harder than people admit, how to do this in the real world including the parts of the world that have never even heard of the concept of raw foods.
Twenty-three years is a long time. Long enough to have watched trends come and go, watched people do this for a year or few and declare themselves authorities, watched the same misinformation recycle itself across platforms with new faces attached to it. I am not interested in competing with any of that. I'm just someone who has been doing this for a very long time, and has something real and often quite simple to share about it. I like simple, delicious eating.
The Work Along the Way
I have never done one thing. I am what can be labelled a multipotentialite.
This has confused people throughout my life — the ones who urged me to pick a lane, build a brand around a single skill, become the raw food person or the meditation person or the filmmaker or the designer. I've never been able to explain, in terms that satisfied them, why that felt like being asked to let something die. I contain all of these things. They are not separate.
I have been a web developer and a graphic designer and entrepreneur. In 1995 I began producing an online magazine and community for the LGBTQIA+ family while living in Brooklyn, and moved from that to founding one of the earliest web development firms around in 1997. I spent many years living off of doing web and graphic design work for small businesses.
I have been a vlogger. In 2015, I began a daily vlog on YouTube called Cobalt Dreams — 57 videos and a whole 12 subscribers. It was raw and unpolished and entirely real, which is probably the most accurate description of where I was at the time. What mattered was that it existed, and I created it. It was a great start to the vlogging road for me.
I have been a documentary filmmaker. In 2017 I produced a series on intentional communities — the people choosing radically different ways of living together outside mainstream society. Two documentary episodes, made on no budget, that found their audience entirely through organic reach. The second episode has nearly 200,000 views. I self-funded the project through freelance web and graphic design work while building a grassroots nonprofit umbrella from scratch. It ran until the funding didn't, and then I stopped — not because the work wasn't good (I'm extremely proud of it, and invite you to watch both full episodes.), but because I was one person doing the work of many, without the infrastructure to sustain it.
I have been a meditation teacher. I've practiced across traditions for my entire adult life — non-dogmatically, without allegiance to any single lineage, with a deep suspicion of anything that requires you to stop thinking clearly. I made 63 episodes of spiritual and mindfulness content in 2019 on the YouTube channel Blue Cobalt. I was getting closer to offering what I was envisioning, and garnered over 300 subscribers on this channel, with one video reaching over 6,000 views. A promising step on the road.
I have been a sustainable clothing designer, a seahorse keeper, and a builder of a myriad of small businesses and projects that came from the heart and genuine curiosity, and ended when their time was over.
And now there is this — The Uncommon Road. Which is not a new lane. It is all of the lanes, together at once.
Texas — The Long Pause, and the Chapter Still Being Lived
In December 2018 I drove to Texas in my bus to care for my elderly mother.
I won't give this story more drama than it deserves, but I won't minimize it either. I came based on an explicit understanding between us that we would sell the house and relocate somewhere that suited us both. That plan never came to fruition due to my mother's fears. What followed has been approximately seven and a half years in a culture that doesn't fit me, in a place I don't feel entirely safe, with no deep friends that I hang out with, caring for someone who lives life in a completely opposite manner to me, in near-complete isolation.
The longest I had ever stayed in one place before this was around two years. I have been here seven and a half.
I tell you this not for sympathy but for context — and because I know that a significant number of people who find their way to The Uncommon Road will recognize this story in some form. The sensitive person whose sense of obligation has landed them in a difficult situation that is hard to extricate yourself from. The quietly capable person caring for someone who can't or won't acknowledge what that care actually costs. The person who knows exactly who they are and what their life is supposed to feel like, stuck somewhere that feels like the opposite of all of it, building toward something better in whatever hours and corners they can find.
If that's you — I see you. And I can tell you from the middle of doing it that what you build in the constrained time is real. The Blue Cobalt YouTube channel — 63 episodes of genuine spiritual depth and beauty — was created during this time. This new sharing, this desire for community and the experience of the journey, this entire vision is being birthed during this time. Constraint is not the opposite of creativity. Sometimes it is the condition of it, though you will probably still feel lost or trapped at times along the way.
Once this time with my mother has passed, I will be returning to movement, to immersion, to the life that has always been mine. The Uncommon Road is being built now, in Texas, in the constrained hours, because the life we want doesn't wait for perfect conditions to begin. It begins when you decide it does.
That decision was made. This is what it looks like.
What's Coming
Within the next year or so, I will be leaving Texas.
I will fly to France where I will purchase a motorhome — a warm, well-equipped home on wheels — and begin making my way through Europe. The plan is to travel nomadically all over, observing the 90-day Schengen zone rules that govern how long US citizens can stay, moving between countries in the rhythm that those rules create. Not as a constraint but as a structure — a built-in reason to keep moving, to never get too comfortable, to always have a next horizon.
Three cats are coming with me. Gabriella and Samantha, who have been on the road before and will remember what it feels like. And Madeleine, who has not, and whose reactions I am genuinely looking forward to documenting.
I will be eating raw the entire time — finding organic produce at European farmers markets, navigating raw food in countries that have never considered the concept, discovering what it looks like to maintain this way of eating across dozens of different food cultures. I will be meditating in extraordinary places. I will be making friends, and immersing myself in adventures and cultures. I will be filming all of it, honestly, including the parts that don't go as planned, and sharing it all with you.
I want to say clearly what this is not. It is not an escape. It is not a vacation or a gap year or a bucket list or a reward for having endured something difficult. It is a return — to the life that has always been mine, to the movement that is simply how I function when I'm being honest, to the version of myself that knows exactly what it needs and has the courage to build toward it even when the conditions are hard.
The story has already begun. You're reading chapter one.
What The Uncommon Road Is
The Uncommon Road is built around four pillars. Ways of living that have been central to my life for decades, and that I believe — when practiced together, honestly and without fanaticism — point toward something most people spend their whole lives looking for.
Mindfulness is not a technique to master or an app to subscribe to. It is the ongoing act of waking up to your own life — practiced across traditions, without dogma, and completely free of the kind of spiritual bypassing that sounds peaceful and keeps you exactly where you are.
Raw Foods is 23 years of genuine lived experience — what actually works, what is harder than anyone admits, and how to eat this way in the real world. Not a manifesto. A practice. Honest about the difficulties and genuinely enthusiastic about the rewards.
Conscious Living is the practice of making choices that actually reflect who you are — your food, your time, your space, your relationships, your ethics, your work. The beautiful parts and the hard parts both, without a highlight reel. Living like you mean it.
Authentic Being is where the other three lead. A life that is unmistakably yours. Not the one you were handed or the one that looked right on paper — the one that fits. The quiet, radical act of becoming exactly who you are and staying there.
These four things together are not a program or a curriculum. They are a direction. The Uncommon Road is for people who want to walk in that direction — and want honest company while they do.
What You'll Find Here
On YouTube you'll find long-form video content and shorts — mindfulness teachings, raw food preparation, conscious living conversations, and eventually the full, living, unfolding documentary of life on the road in Europe. New videos are coming soon. Be sure and subscribe so you don't miss what's being built from the ground up.
The shop is opening soon, with my first offerings to you currently in development — guides, courses, and resources built from decades of lived experience. Not borrowed expertise. The real thing from me to you.
The email list is where the most personal writing lives. Honest reflections, early access to everything new, and the kind of correspondence that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. No noise. No performance. Just something worth reading each week. If you want to stay close to what's being built here, that's the place to be.
And across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest — come find us wherever you already spend your time. YouTube if you really want the whole picture.
Why This, Why Now
I have been asked, in various forms throughout my life, why I live the way I live. Why the raw foods. Why the road. Why the meditation. Why the refusal to settle into something more conventional, more stable, more easily understandable to the people around me.
The honest answer is that I have never been able to do otherwise. Not as a boast — as a fact. The conventional life has never fit. I have tried, at various points when younger, to make it fit. It doesn't. And at some point the energy required to keep trying outweighs any comfort the trying provides, and you just stop.
What's left, when you stop, is the life that was always waiting.
The Uncommon Road exists because I believe there are a lot of people in the position I have been in — knowing who they are, feeling or knowing what their life wants to be, and looking for the honest company of someone who has actually walked that road, who will tell them the truth about it. Not the highlight reel. Not the manifesto. The actual thing.
That's what I'm here to offer. Not as a guru. Not as someone who has figured it all out. As someone who has been asking the same questions for decades, has found that the asking is the practice, and wants to share what the road actually looks like from the inside.
This is the right time because this life is happening right now — the present moment, the preparation, the departure, the journey, all of it unfolding in real time. You get to be here from the beginning of this new chapter of the journey. Your life is happening right now.
The Uncommon Road is here for the choosing. Come walk it with me.
Blue Cobalt, Nomad at heart