The Recovery Community

Guest Bio: Kurt Rasmussen, Founder of Recovery Community Toolsmiths

At age 54, Kurt Rasmussen admitted to himself that he was an alcoholic.

That evening, he went to his first AA meeting. In the days ahead he would attend many meetings, and would enter a world whose existence he had little suspected: the world of recovery. Kurt learned that the core truth of the recovery world, in contrast to the “real world,” is that here you don’t get to count anyone out. It was where he needed to be.

After staying sober for a few months, Kurt took a month off from his corporate IT job and made a bicycle trip across the south, from Austin, TX to Savannah, GA. It was on that journey that he learned that your real thinking gets done with your body, rather than your mind, in a place in you more primordial than language.

When Kurt got back he knew he needed to take another road with his life. The direction he had gone for so long was making him sick. As a maker, a builder, an artist and an artisan, Kurt loves to make things that are useful to people. That is his authentic calling, and he needed to get back in touch with that.

Kurt has designed and written computer programs for over thirty years. “Software Engineer,” “Full Stack Developer,” etc. -- these are all mainly just status terms in the corporate IT world, which is a world with its own toxicity, and which can make people sick.

The thing to know is: Kurt writes computer programs, and he’s good at it. He’s a published word-poet, and a code-poet also.