The Big Birth: Rethinking the Origin of the Universe

For over a century, science has described the beginning of everything with the phrase “the Big Bang.” It’s a striking image, loud, explosive, and masculine-coded. But as a midwife, and as someone who has spent years holding space for the mystery of creation in the human body, I see it differently. The universe didn’t bang into existence. It birthed.

A bang is violent, sudden, and over in an instant. A birth is organic, unfolding, often messy, deeply creative, and ongoing. And science itself tells us the universe is still expanding. That means creation is not something finished long ago, it is still happening right now. We are all still inside the labor of the cosmos.

Quantum physics even gives us language for this truth. What looks like “empty space” is not empty at all. Physicists call it the quantum vacuum or zero-point field, a seething ocean of possibility where particles are constantly appearing and disappearing. Mystics have always called this the fertile void, the womb of creation. Every possibility exists here before becoming form. Nothing is truly static; everything is gestating. The same womb that birthed the stars is birthing still.

Long before modern science, ancient traditions honored this. The Mayans spoke of Imox, the cosmic waters of potential. Taoists revered Wuji, the fertile nothing before yin and yang. In the Vedic tradition, Shakti is the mother-womb from which universes emerge. Christian mystics glimpsed Creatio Continua, creation as ongoing. Only through a masculine lens did we name it a “bang.” Those who lived close to the earth, to cycles, to birth, they knew it as a labor, a continual emergence.

This shift in story matters. If the universe is still birthing, then we are not separate from that process, we are participants in it. When you pray, visualize, or meditate, you are not forcing something into being. You are entering the same fertile void that birthed galaxies and planting your seed of intention there. Manifestation is not about making something happen; it is about midwifing what is already alive in potential. As a midwife, I have seen again and again how creation takes time, trust, surrender, and support. The same is true for the universe itself.

It is time we retire the image of the Big Bang and begin telling the story of the Big Birth, a story that honors creation as sacred, that balances masculine and feminine ways of knowing, and that reminds us we are not bystanders in a dead cosmos but co-birthers in a living one.

I invite you to begin practicing this shift in your own life. Instead of asking, “How do I make this happen?” ask, “How do I plant this in the fertile void?” When you meditate or visualize, see yourself as a midwife, holding space for your dreams, your healing, and your abundance to be birthed from the quantum womb. And share this perspective with others. Together we can change the story of how we see the universe itself: not as an explosion, but as a birth still unfolding.