Walking back through the village after the Sunday church service, Carolyn Byrne is feeling settled for the first time in months.

Byrne had been a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society for a few years before the invitation to Lundy landed in her inbox. The solitude of an island lost in time appealed to her, and she booked the ticket without thinking.

As soon as she arrived on the island, the tiny bars of signal on her iPhone disappeared. Byrne, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, felt as if she hadn’t been out of cell range since 1999, when every junior associate at her old New York corporate law firm was issued a Blackberry.

“There's a point when everyone's just checking off all the boxes, like ‘Oh, I have to go to Target to pick up more paper towels’ or, you know, ‘Little Johnny has to go to swim class and Suzy has to go to gymnastics,’” she says. “And you wonder, when was the last time I was able to just do this, look at clouds and play music? And that was in the fourth grade.”

The 45-year-old, who lives with her husband and their three young children and also has three adult stepchildren, had forgotten what it felt like to sit still and look up at the world above her. In her Manhattan neighborhood, she can see only slivers of the sky sandwiched between high-rises. On Lundy, the sky, and with it the world, has doubled in view.

“I’m so far away from home, but it feels less like discovering and more like remembering, if that makes sense,” she says as she navigates a field of sheep droppings on an uphill walk to her cottage.

“I remember growing up in Long Island lying on my back in the front yard, looking up at the sky and picking out shapes.”