Summer, Sound, and the Shape of Attention

I’m a summer baby. My favourite month is autumn, I’m most comfortable in winter, but at heart I’m a child of summer wind. Summer has just arrived in Tasmania with heat and fire, red sunsets and the promise of long warm nights. We’ll probably have snow on the mountain tomorrow, but aside from that small blip in summer programming, the season of my birth is here.

With summer comes the old sensory imprint of my childhood home - reading in my bedroom with the windows open, podding peas with my mother in the kitchen as the sea breeze wandered through open windows, the soft dawn coolness that only summer can make holy.

Early evening across the valley

And lawnmowers. How Australian is that?

The dusty, well-loved mower is probably part of the suburban soundtrack in many places. For me as a kid, that droning hum meant peace and predictability, the world doing what it always did. Now I have two of my own — a big ride-on for the paddock and a small push mower for the house yard. Fancy pants me, I know. I enjoy mowing, it’s satisfying, grounding, and frankly practical in the face of Tasmanian fire seasons.

But it’s the sound I’m listening to right now, echoing up and down the valley, that stirs memory and nostalgia in my bones. The sound of home.

Listening to the neighbour’s mower grumbling and the louder racket of a ride-on further along the road could be a passive experience, background noise for whatever else I’m doing. Perception is usually framed that way: light entering the eye, sound landing on the eardrum, sensation brushing the skin. Mechanical, automatic, something that happens to us.

But the real work of perception happens in the act of attention. That shift, the shape of attention, is what changes how the world reaches us.

Tim Ingold writes that hearing is not the same as listening. Hearing receives, listening leans in. Listening is intentional. It is a way of showing up that alters the texture of the moment.

Animism, at least the way I live it, begins in that lean.

I don’t mean animism in the cartoon sense, no lawnmower rolling up on its hind wheels to give a speech before slaying a field of grass. For me, spirit is present everywhere, but not as a personality. Spirit is depth, presence, potency, and a kind of aliveness that doesn’t need a face or a voice.

The more I practice, the more I realise that spirit doesn’t appear because I’m looking for it.

Spirit is already there. Attention simply creates the conditions where relation becomes perceptible. It’s not that objects have spirit or that spirit arises in relation - it’s both. Spirit exists, and relation is how we meet it.

Perception, then, is not passive reception. It is participation.

So I’m listening, deliberately now.

There’s noise from three or four mowers moving through the warm valley air. When I listen,

I’m not just receiving their sound. I’m entering the shared field they’re generating. Their presence shapes the valley’s mood. The ride-on has a full-bodied rumble; a smaller mower sounds strained; another glides lightly, almost effortless; and faintly, very faintly, one might be riding into the sunset.

These aren’t personalities I’m imagining. They’re qualities of motion, labour, and resonance creating textures of aliveness carried through sound.

I’m not just listening to them; I’m listening with them.

Each mower has its own way of being in the world, its own animacy, if you like, the subtle aliveness that shows in how it moves, strains, glides, announces itself across the valley.

When I listen, truly listen, I’m not extracting information. I’m meeting the world in a space of overlap. Listening is the moment where my awareness and the world’s presence touch. A point of contact. A place where something more than observation becomes possible.

Attention is not neutral. It’s a small act of welcome and intention.

This is why ordinary moments can feel charged, the current creating a subtle pull, a sense of being-with rather than simply being-in. Not especially dramatic, just a quiet reconfiguration of the field between myself and whatever I’m attending to.

To live animistically is not to imagine goggly-eyed spirits in everything like a bad anime. It’s to acknowledge the ways spirit makes itself known when attention becomes relational. Listening is one of the first movements toward that kind of relation. A softening, a leaning, a willingness to be affected.

And in those moments, when the noise drops away and the world settles into focus, perception becomes something else. Not passive. Not observational. But participatory. A

shared act of presence.

This is where urban animism actually lives - not in symbols or mythic narratives, but in the subtle recalibration of how we attend to the world. Spirit reveals itself not through spectacle, but through shifts in the quality of attention.

Listening is the doorway. Lean in.