WOODLAND SUPERHEROES STUDIOS
Rowan is ten, and knowing the name of something is rarely enough for him. He wants to know why it is there, what it needs, what needs it, and what happens because it is.
A movement in the water, something underneath a stone, a bird returning to the same place – any of them can become a question.
And once Rowan has a question, he has a habit of getting very close to the answer.
Some of Rowan’s earliest fascinations came from a distance. Animal documentaries, David Attenborough, Steve Irwin, videos and stories showed him creatures and places far beyond anything he could reach himself.
But watching never made the outside world less interesting. It made him want to see things for himself.
Could he find anything like that near home?
That question started pulling Rowan outside. Not somewhere extraordinary.
Just outside.
And once he started looking properly, ordinary places stopped feeling quite so ordinary.
Rowan asks a lot of questions. When he was younger, Dad would take him looking for birds’ nests in spring and summer. Dad was surprisingly good at spotting things Rowan had missed, and Rowan loved those days.
Every time Dad found something Rowan hadn’t noticed, an ordinary place seemed to contain a little more than it had before.
Sometimes Dad knows the answers. Sometimes they look things up together. Sometimes Rowan is certain he has found one thing and Dad helps him realise it is something completely different.
And sometimes neither of them knows.
Those might be Rowan’s favourite questions.
Rowan rarely investigates something from very far away.
He lies at the edges of ponds with his sleeves pulled above his elbows. He puts his hands through duckweed, turns over stones and catches frogs, newts, pond insects and little sticklebacks.
If something moves, he wants to know what.
If something disappears, he wants to know where.
Sometimes he knows exactly where to look without having any idea what he is looking at.
And sometimes his curiosity gets him closer than he probably should.
Rowan is still learning that meeting something does not always mean touching it.
He wants to know: What does it need? What needs it? Why is it here? What happens because it is here?
A bee leads him to a flower. A flower to a seed. The seed somewhere else entirely.
Before long, the one thing Rowan thought he was looking at turns out to be part
of something much bigger.
That is usually when he gets really interested.
Rowan doesn’t just notice things. Sometimes he looks closer, draws what he has seen or writes something down because he doesn’t want to forget it. Sometimes he goes back to see whether anything has changed.
His magnifying glass, colouring pencils, journal, sit mat, earphones and backpack are ordinary things. They matter because of what happens while he is using them.
She even stitched two eyes onto the bag to watch over him wherever he went.
Rowan never got to take his Nan on the adventures he imagined.
In loving memory of Yvonne Hawkins
And that’s rather the point. Rowan doesn’t know where his next discovery will come from. Some happen outside. Some begin with something Dad shows him. Some reach him through a photograph, a story or something happening in the wider world. And sometimes they begin with something small that almost went unnoticed.
He just keeps looking.
Rowan’s Articles are where those discoveries continue.
