EXPERIENCE OF “SEVENTH” THROUGH THE EYES OF A VISITOR / RESIDENT IN THE FORM OF AN INTERVIEW, HELD IN THE YEAR 2025
We sit with Jan van Loon on the eve of Christmas in the year 2025 near Rotterdam and Van Loon talks about his life, change, his grief and his experience of “Seventh”, the pyramids that were built in the Netherlands in 2012… He starts with an explanation;
“In 1975 I was twelve years old and now in 2025 I am sixty-two years old…”
I was twelve years old. I kept crying on the way home. I walked two kilometers and had to stop. Again to cry. I fell to my knees, put my elbows on the dark earth and cried, as if I was born for this. My tears fell into the fresh furrows we had just laid and they would fill them if they could. Scorched, the earth beneath my feet would then yield only salty potatoes. Samphire would taste sweet with the taste of these potatoes, if my body were really big. And I thought I wouldn’t get any bigger when I heard on our potato land that my mother had passed away.
Although my life changed a lot, I grew and everything became more and more beautiful. I was born here, I thought, and I loved the land and the environment like a real farmer. My love was green. It consisted of the field, the beautiful sunrise and sunset. And that too would change. “What will she look like when I’m older?” I often wondered as a thirty-year-old man. Yes, I knew that our farmland had to make way for other plans. The generation after me would no longer succeed me. And what was I to believe about the plans to create a beautiful nature reserve? This often still became a disguised residential area, because this yielded the most for the municipality. Can that actually be stopped?
For the first time on the new estate “Seventh”
Then I walked long before my fifties through the nature reserve with green meadows, a hilly landscape and many trees. It was very accessible and I found a mixture of many types of trees, herbs in the wild and herb gardens. There were even gazebos, an amphitheater, a canal, beautiful bridges, beautiful, elongated farmhouses built of natural stone, where people slept who worked in the large pyramid-shaped building. There was also a natural swimming pool in the area, with shady corners. And at the lake I walked a lot along a rocky outcrop, over a beach, where people gathered. A little further I came to a marina with those atmospheric corners, wooden decking and terraces with mud houses in different colors, as if it were on the Mediterranean Sea.
When I walked there, I still smelled the land, because there was still arable farming. There were gardens beneath the large glass building. It was full of fruit and various vegetables, and it looked like a sea of flowers. There were strawberry caves five feet high. Tomatoes hung in bunches from a kind of hanging lake, in circles, all connected. Beans formed hedges of a whole number of round smaller and larger gardens with their plants. In between was the radish, different types of lettuce and pumpkins. On the outer edges were or rather were rhubarb, spinach, red and white cabbage, cauliflower and carrots. On the north side were the potato fields, large green round discs interspersed with white fragrant flowers, each time interspersed with a single herb garden that suited the atmosphere.
And while I have never liked pyramids before, they were a very pleasant change in the oh so flat Netherlands. In the glass walls I saw the clouds pass by. And when I went through the scanner in one of the legs in one of the health rooms, I was amazed. Each time I experienced more view and insight. I learned all kinds of things about the backgrounds of diseases and how you can stay healthy better. They stated that you could stay healthier and experience more balance, and I think that’s true.
The green helped relieve many of their stress. And I just can’t stop telling about it, as one couldn’t see past the regional gardens. In the south were the different tree species that grew around the Mediterranean Sea. I think there were even palm trees around the natural pool, haha.
In the north, on the other hand, at that time we even saw different kinds of coniferous trees, and if we looked further, we saw the ice floes of the joke that was played at that time, during the time of so-called great climate changes. At that time, people were generally fearful that the ice caps would melt very quickly and the Netherlands would be flooded.
In the east one could see the imitation of the polders and also the various mills, which served as polder mills for a long time before the completion of the pyramids. There were also green practice areas all over the grounds for the novice golfer. During the day people would see those golf carts and the carts of the elderly often didn’t even stand out. And on the paths you could also cycle and rollerblade.
Looking west and standing high in the pyramid, with some effort we could see the dunes and the North Sea. The pool, with the harbour, rocky outcrops and beach to the north of the pool, facing the sun, was clearly visible from one of the three restaurants and was a delight for every living soul with eyes.
If I hadn’t moved there, I would still have visited the pyramid as much as possible. After all, I was in my old, beautiful and pleasant environment, but it was also precisely that environment in the pyramid that calmed me. Something actually happened to you. Besides being an imposing building, you could feel that ‘harmonizing’ was actually happening when you were in the area or walking around inside.
I can still remember the first time when I first came into contact with the people of ‘Seventh’. Pleasant people, I thought them then. I’ve never had to change that opinion. My pleasant experiences only increased in number as I learned more about philosophy. In ‘Seventh’ people didn’t care about opinions in general. You could just be yourself there. And the responsibility I could take for my life and for my health were the main reasons I didn’t expect to live there. I felt safe if something was really going on, saw a lot of people I found interesting, collaborated on innovation pieces and took my grandchildren to daycare when they stayed over.
If you were to ask me now what was so great about ‘Seventh’, I would say: ‘The fact that I could find everything there, food, drink, health, nice living, but also the professionalism of the people who worked there.’ Of course I liked that I didn’t have to go outside, could visit the spa extensively and experience a kind of oasis on every level, because there were gardens in every conservatory. But when you get older, you still want to be able to do those normal things. It is true that many others come to visit you, because you live in such a separate building, they want to experience the form and of course visit the central operating room, or ‘the sphere’ as it was called.
You were part of society in ‘Seventh’. Actually even more because everything was within reach, and there was a lot available for the general and for the wellness and health seeker. I was also a lot at the medical and interactive, innovative conferences, not to mention the theater plays. In ‘Seventh’ I ate the most delicious food, experienced the most beautiful evenings and saw how useful I was to society, my immediate environment and myself.
“Yeah, ‘Seventh’ was my best change!”
If you want to know more about ‘Seventh’ you can click on www.TheOtherWayofLiving.nl