One Day as One Life

Each day is one life. Life is not about the accumulation of days in a linear sense, but about how each morning is a new opportunity, a new birth. At night, when we drift into the dream realm, we experience a sort of death where we traverse the nine levels of Xibalba. Xibalba is the place of frights, the realm of trials and challenges, and there’s no guarantee we’ll return. The Popol Wuj reminds us every sunrise symbolizes the victory of the Hero Twins outsmarting the Lords of Xibalba. In other words, each time the sun rises, our next chance to live life rises, too.

When I sit on my cushion, I connect with the primordial energy of Imox—water, ocean, intuition—recognizing that my identity, “mariana,” is just a singular story and an illusion. By coming into silence, I see that life is so much bigger than my personal narrative or my daily aches and pains. Amid massive grief, I also experience being alive. I am safe, in a warm home surrounded by family (humans, cats, and plant relatives) with a body that still gets to run, swim, and lift weights. I get to do impermanent things. Like me. This realization invites gratitude, it invites me to recognize that each breath is a gift, each day a microcosm of existence. I get to be here, in this microcosm to make the small changes that bring liberation to the present. 

Layers of Memory

Mamí has dementia. This simple thought carries so many complex emotions within it, and they all rush in every time I say it. Dementia has its own cycles, repeating stories sometimes in contradictory ways. One version of a memory surfaces in one moment, and then a few minutes later, the same memory emerges slightly altered or sometimes vastly different. And yet, each time, it feels valid. Each iteration reveals a new detail or emotion.

This pattern serves as a reminder that time is not a neat, linear path. Instead, it spirals, offering us glimpses of our past, each time with a new perspective. When my daughter and I talk about Mamí’s dementia, we notice how multiple truths can co-exist. We can feel immense grief as we watch her slip away, while simultaneously reliving joyful moments with her in the present even as they evaporate. Those memories live in us, the vibrations of our laughter and tears will forever change the structure of the universe. This is how memory works for me now, I know somehow we are always entering each other’s timelines. Our memories are not in the past, they exist in their telling in the present as well.

Meditation has taught me the cyclical nature of time. That sense of time folding and unfolding on itself helps me sit with the daily grief and heartache of Mamí’s disappearing. She is dying. Her spirit slowly untethering from this reality. It reminds me of when you’re a kid with a helium-filled balloon and the string slips from your hands. You are painfully constrained, a helpless bystander witnessing it fly away into the distance. I can’t stop dementia but I can breathe into the spaciousness. I sit with each cycle of presence with Mamí as long as possible until the cycle restarts again. In the spaciousness of that present moment, I let immense love guide me toward acceptance of the inevitable truth that soon this moment of clarity will end. Today I allowed the tears to flow as I held her hand and caressed it. I told her how much I miss her constant presence. I acknowledged the immeasurable gift of having been her child, of still being her child. How I will always be her child. And then, she was gone again and she asked me who I was. Another death, another opportunity for life.

Acceptance in the Face of Everything

Meditation has taught me acceptance. Sometimes I catch myself thinking: How can I sit here, with my candle and my music, while the world bleeds? The truth is, none of us can solve every tragedy single-handedly but this doesn’t mean we’re powerless. It means our greatest strength is realizing we are never alone, that we are all part of a greater whole. It’s like how Mamí is not really gone, she is caught in shorter cycles of renewal. When I become present, I can choose my actions to embody liberation. Doesn’t it sound beautiful? The possibility that already exists in every moment? Sitting in meditation each morning might seem insignificant but it has given me the spaciousness to go deep. 

The eurocentric worldview and colonial ways of structuring time as purely linear can make us feel powerless as if we’re just marching forward to an end, collecting achievements or losses. The cyclical perspective that I’m learning and relearning daily is different. Mamí’s dementia teaches me that time is relative. It reminds me that every day, every moment, we have the chance to be reborn, to redefine how we love, create, and fight for justice. We’re not stuck in an unstoppable forward march; we’re in a dance of returns and renewals.

Circling Back to Love

Watching Mamí’s memory unravel has forced me to see that life is not defined by a single continuity of facts or stories. It is more complex than that. Life is how we feel, how we connect, and how we show up in each moment. Some days, I wish I could talk to Mamí as she once was because I just need a mom. So often I live in contradictions too, I want to hold her in my arms and cry over the grief and heartbreak of her eventual passing, and laugh with her about how I am actually more like her than I care to admit. I want her to know she was so vital in shaping me to be who I am. But time doesn’t work like that anymore—not for her or me. We’re in a new cycle. We now live in days made up of intermittent moments of life, death, and rebirth.

I do, however, find comfort in this truth: love is timeless. It remains even when memory fades. It remains in the ways I’ve grown, in how I raise my daughter, and in every breath I take as I greet the morning. It’s woven into every new cycle of the sun’s return, existing in the spaces that transcend logic or linear time.

I’m learning to live each day as if it were the only one, balancing grief for the world with gratitude for dementia and my life in this body. Is it paradoxical? Absolutely. Paradox is where the deepest truths often lie. The past, present, and future co-exist. Each time I rise in the morning, I get the chance to shift the entire universe simply by being here—by appreciating the ground beneath my feet, listening to the meows of my insistent cats, loving Mamí in her altered state, being witnessed by and loving my daughter, and refusing to yield to despair and the immense grief that cohabitates with us in this world.

This Is My Cycle of One 

I wake up. I meditate. I feel grief. I am grateful. I remember that it’s all interconnected. I do the best I can with what is in front of me. And tomorrow, if I am lucky enough to rise again, I’ll do it again. Perhaps with more compassion for myself and for the world. Remembering one day my cycle of one will come to an end, too. The sun rises on a new day. I tumble with curiosity toward the next cycle, ready for the unknown.