Regina speaks and draws eloquently about the movement: The growing number of us who are taking charge of our health, our family’s health, our community’s health, and ultimately our country’s health. At the Health 2.0 conference, I met an engineer who also is an MD, an MD who is a geek, a geek who is a healer, and a healer who is a patient.

Alexandra Drane proclaimed: “We signed up to help people be healthy,” which I found remarkable coming from the founder of Eliza, which I thought of only as a robo-call company but now appreciate as a company committed to using technology to promote healthy behavior.

Michel Nadeau confided that his years as a telecomm engineer were nowhere near as fulfilling his new gig as head of a startup that makes an obesity app. “A teenager sent me an email. She was writing at midnight on a Sunday, asking for help because she couldn’t bear to go to school the next morning and face the teasing because of her weight. How can that not affect you? I know what we’re doing has real impact on people.”

Ob/gyn Jeff Livingston is motivating teen girls to take care of themselves by engaging them on FaceBook. Chris Cartter is trying to make health challenges go viral through his Change Reaction program. Physician Richard Wexler was talking to video game designers for insights on patient/doctor communication.

A few days later I was with my brethren at Kaiser Permanente for our annual gathering of communicators and marketers. We saw research that shows the marketplace is ripe for a health movement. Americans know that the health care system is broken, and they don’t trust the industry or the government to fix it. They know that ultimately the solution starts with them.

They just need a nudge.

The Cabin was a tiny A-frame that sheltered six adults and 10 kids at a time. No running water, refrigeration or flush toilets. An amusement park of stinging nettles, tamed chipmunks, rainbow trout, mud chutes, abandoned kittens and rusty nails.

My cousin Jerry is trying to create a similar amusement park for our kids, in the badlands of western Colorado, almost to Utah. No running water, refrigeration or flush toilets (yet). An ATV endurance course, scorpions,  coyotes and rusty nails. The kids already love it and we don’t have the shooting range in yet.

Last weekend Jerry took me on a quad tour of his property, a high-desert oasis broken by washes that are either dry or torrents. Jerry pointed to lots of attractions — nearly all of them started. Here’s the party area, there’s the “sacred teepee,” over yonder the pee-pee teepee, and the secret tunnel he dug with a rental tractor (taking the precaution to carry a 15-foot bamboo pole to breathe through in case of cave-in). It was like Dr. John Hammond revealing his cloned dinosaurs through the windows of the Jurassic Park tourist van.

So all of us who once packed into the attic of the A-frame got together last weekend to pack desert dirt into old tires, helping Jerry build his Earth Ship, an off-the-grid, rainwater recycling, earthen insulated house. After the sun goes down, it’s story time. Jerry was getting lots of laughs about the time he drove his truck so far up Leon Creek that even the local sheepherders were impressed. I remembered I had a topper.

Grandpa had an old Willys Jeep (grandpa had lots of toys, but they were strictly blue collar brands). He once packed the adults and half a dozen kids into the Jeep for a fishing trip up Leon Creek. He bogged down in a muddy field, miles from the nearest AAA and beyond winch-cable reach of the closest tree. He and Dad wrapped the winch cable around huge boulders, but succeeded only in ripping them out of the ground. Grandpa made us all get out and walk while he gunned the lightened Jeep through the mud track. The car bounced and fishtailed through the muck, and in the rear window we saw the blonde bouncing head of my forgotten 2-year-old brother, Ken. Our parents were as bad at counting kids as they were at counting days.

Telling the story 40 years later, I could still see the bouncing blonde head and I had to help my cousins (and Ken) see it too. So I bobbed up and down, backed over a bench and tumbled into the dust that is Jerry’s future front yard. I could see “did he break his hip?” concern in my family’s faces, so I popped back up and did an “I’m-OK-just-need-to-walk-it-off” thing. The back of my knee hurt like hell, though.

So since I tell stories for a living, should I report this to OSHA?

BTW, for a Yahoo community discussion about the expression “BLANK walked across my grave,” go here.

A Boston Globe photographer, he pulls a broad range of assignments: from cupcake food shot to Haiti earthquake relief. It’s impressive: he captures exquisite moments, whether firing away on the run or directing a team of designers and assistants.

I knew Essdras when he was a photographer at the Rocky Mountain News and I was an editor there. A native of Panama, he is a force of nature. I see in his profile that he does photo workshops, practices martial arts and created a blend of yoga, martial arts and personal training. All that talent — and so good looking that even a hetero guy like me can’t help but remark about it.

Do yourself a favor and check the photo blog out — he gives a little back story to the photo shoots, plus some technical stuff. I have added him to my blog roll.

My aunt plans to live in a teepee in the badlands on the Colorado-Utah border, so of course the family got together to build it. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we had an instruction book and lots  of opinions. The canvas fit the tangle of poles about as well as a size 8 pair of jeans on a size 12 butt. With my aunt and her sister — my mom — beating drums, cousin Jerry shimmied to the top of the poles to survey the problem. It was sturdy enough to hold him, though it would later collapse.

Teepee project: Too many chiefs; not enough Indians from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

With a day full of dust and beer behind us, we called it a night. Next day, we resolved to chuck the instruction manual and instead listen to the only Indian in the family, Leona, the partner of my cousin’s daughter.  We’re a diverse family.

There was an essential first step involving the proper arrangement and lashing of the first three poles. Then Leona carefully directed placement of supporting poles. A graceful apex emerged, eagle feathers fluttering. She showed us how to neatly fold the canvas and tie it to the main pole. All hands hoisted it into Leona’s chosen position. The canvass unfurled, Leona showed us how to use the vent flaps.

The teepee looked solid and sturdy. It better be: it’s windier than hell out there. I think my aunt will do fine there in the winter. Jerry sunk the living area into the ground, which should keep inside temperatures within a comfortable range. A small stove will serve for cooking and heating.

The land could be described accurately as desolate or stunning. Desolate if you crave lushness; stunning if you are partial to magnificent sunsets on multi-hued bluffs. The neighbors are armed but friendly if you don’t trespass.

I look forward to visiting — and helping Jerry build his earth ship on a nearby ridge.

A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

This video by Maya Lin (creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) helped me grasp the enormity of the statistic. The haunting melody by Brian Eno also transfixed me. Others who have blogged/tweeted about this also mention the tune. About the 20th time today that I’ve been reminded that the key to a good video is good sound.

Maya Lin – Unchopping A Tree from Unchop A Tree on Vimeo.

Kai gives Granny a knitting lesson from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

What I’ve learned so far:

• Video is not as forgiving as written storytelling. If you don’t get the beginning, middle and end captured in video, your story will stink. You either have to stage a reenactment, or you resort to a silly text card.
• Sound is the most important part of video. I’ve had decent visual, but lousy sound. Nothing you can do with that. Conversely, with good sound you can get by in editing.
• On the scene, you have to work harder on a video story than on a written story. You snooze, you lose the one piece of action that would make the whole story.

I uploaded several months’ worth of video capture to my Vimeo account today. Rather than use the feature-filled, but molasses-slow CyberLink software, I slapped segments together using FlipShare. I am satisfied with the FlipShare results — the editing quality matches the Flip capture quality. We’re not talking Cannes here.

The video I chose to embed in this post is my favorite from a video storytelling standpoint — a finger knitting session between my Mom and my 9-year-old daughter. No written word can match the close-up of my Mom’s gnarled fingers, or the quiet exasperation on Kai’s face, or the poignant moment between Mom and my wife Karen, or Kai’s feet-kicking thrill when Granny thanks her for the help. It doesn’t cover a lot of territory, but it is a hint at the special power of video storytelling.