The wound is where the sun pours in

She lay on the sand, facing the sun. Even in death, she is a haven for an inevitable profusion of life; swirling, thriving, chaotic, indomitable. Not quite still. Not quite peaceful.

The cargo ship, Orchard Reefer, cracked open when an explosion in her engine room caused her to sink, 10 metres off the coast of Djibouti near Moucha Island, sloping down to 27 metres.

Two days before my dive, a storm battered the area, causing pieces of the ship to break off - reinventing her even in death. I've never dived such a big wreck before, and Orchard Reefer touched me in more ways than one.

Her deck had become a literal coral garden. For a hulk of metal that hadn't been sanitised before it was sunk, it was heaving with life, such as I had never seen before. Thousands of reef fish - yellow, silver, blue, red - danced around, barely scattering as we swam right in the middle of their schools.

The best part was the breach where the explosion in the engine room had occurred, cracking the vessel into two. We swam through the crack and the light from the sun poured in from above, glinting off the scales of hundreds of fish that cascaded through the openings, looping gracefully around the spindly corals that had colonised and softened the jagged metal edges. A demure moray eel coiled under one of the ramparts stared at us, while parrot fish and damsels flitted through the nooks and crannies of the wreck in a busy, fussy manner.

That a crack could host such hidden, immeasurable beauty was an amazement in itself. The break was a transformation, into which such abundant, colourful and diverse life erupted. Life found a way, and what a way it was! A celebration in an ecosystem.

But wasn't it Leonard Cohen who sang that the crack is where the light comes in, and Rumi who said the wound is where the light enters you?