Sommary. I n the paper stoehastio processes with an embedded marked point process (PMP) are investigated. The en~hedded points pplit the P M P up to so-called cyoles. A great number of classes of stochastic processes, such as piecewise Markov, regenerative, semiregenerative etc., can be understood as special PMP where the cycles form a i?Iarkov chain. It is shown that there exists a one-to-one correspondence between distributions of stationary sequences of cycles and distributions of stationary PMP, where no independence assumptions about the cycles have to be made. Further, an ergodictheorsm for PMP is stated that shows in which way the distribution of a stationary PNIP arises as a limit clistribution of the associated sequence of cycles. This is the basis farproviding s n elementary proof of the Orey-Jacod-Kesten theorem for se~ni~regenerative processes.K e y words: Random masked paint process, stationary process, ergodic theorem, semi regenerative process, Orey-Jacod-Kesten theorem.