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Begin in the trysting-bower, where the night has grown long with waiting. The stars are lit like small lamps, the jasmine has opened its white mouths to the dark, and Śrī Rādhikā stands at the threshold of the kuñja that was meant to hold two and tonight holds only one. He is late again. O Prāṇeśvarī, He is late again. She turns Her face down every path, and every path is empty, and the heart that has learned a thousand reasons for His delay now invents the thousand and first. Is He held in some other grove? Has He lost His way among the tamāla? Has the river risen across His road? And close beside Her, never once leaving, stands Śrīpāda in her kinkarī-form, pouring small words of comfort over the lamenting Svāminī the way one cups water over a fevered brow, for this is her whole existence, to be with Her Svāminī for better and for worse.

But love cannot sit still while the Beloved is lost. Hearing that pitiful lament, the maidservant resolves to go and find Him. Out she steps into the moon-washed forest, toward the far side of Vṛndāvana where Śyāmasundara has wandered, looking for the very One who waits for Him. See the symmetry of this love, O heart: She searches the paths for Him with Her eyes, and He roams the other paths searching for Her, and the whole forest tonight is two longings circling one another in the dark.

Now find Him there. The moon climbs the quarter of the sky, and the moment He sees it He is undone, for that round brightness is nothing but the moon-like face of Rādhikā risen in the heavens to mock His emptiness, and His desperation deepens. And then His eyes fall upon the cool sand of the path, and there, pressed into it, small and unmistakable, are Her special footprints. Her feet have walked here. The very soles that the rasikas call the abode of all rasa have touched this earth and left their shape behind, and at the sight He is swept under by ecstatic feeling.

Watch now what happens to the cloud-dark Lord. He who steals the heart of the three worlds is here robbed of His own. A blue luster gushes out from His limbs in the rush of ecstasy, and that gushing makes the already-sweet Mukunda sweeter than sweet, madhura-madhura, sweetness folded upon sweetness until the word can hold no more. He does not merely look at the footprints. He lowers Himself to them. The Saṅgīta Mādhava sings it without flinching: pathi pathi madana-madākula gokula-candra kalita-pada-mūlam, Gokula's own moon, intoxicated with lusty longing, rolls in the footprints of Śrī Rādhā, path after path after path, His face pressed to the place Her feet have been. He gathers that dust and smears it across His whole body as a starving man would clutch found gold, and the more He takes the more His thirst flares, for this is the one treasure that drinking does not exhaust. This is what "generous" means in His love, that udāra, nava-udāra anurāga, ever-new and openhanded: it does not run dry, it does not grow stale, it pours and pours and is fuller for the pouring.

And here is the wonder the verse cannot get over, the camatkāra that astonishes all of Vṛndā's forest: that He, the embodiment of bliss, the madhura-madhurānanda-mūrti, the goal toward whom all yogis strain, lies in the dust at the mark of Her feet. The greatness, the sumahimā of those footprints, is measured not by what we say of them but by what He does before them. If the dust where She has walked can bring the Lord of all rasa to His knees, drunk with love, then what are these footprints? Treasure-houses. Reservoirs. Oceans of wonder, adbhuta-rasa-nidhāna, poured into the small shape of a sole.

The hidden maidservant watches it all, and her heart swells, not with her own glory but with her Svāminī's, and she grows proud of the influence Her Svāminī holds over Kṛṣṇa. "Aha Svāmini," she thinks, "how sweet Your Śyāma is, and how immeasurably sweeter He becomes the moment He bends to Your footprints. See how He belongs to You. See how even His sweetness is Your possession." No one on earth can relish this scene as she relishes it, for she is rādhā-snehādhikā, tilted wholly toward Rādhā, and the sweetness of Kṛṣṇa is dearest to her precisely as the proof of Rādhā's sovereignty over Him.

Then, ecstatic, she steps from her hiding into the open, and Śyāma, lifting His head from the dust, reads even her arrival as the footprints' gift. "Just see how great these footprints are," He thinks, "for by their grace a dūtī, a messenger from Rādhikā, has suddenly come to me." And so the very footprints that drew Him down become the thread that draws Him home, for the maidservant turns and leads Śyāma at last toward Svāminī's kuñja, two longings about to become one.

This is why the tradition keeps the memory of how the dust of Vraja is honored. Haridās Dāsajī tells it in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Jīvana: Śrī Jagannātha Dāsa Bābājī Mahārāja once begged a ruṭi, a piece of bread, as alms not from kings or temples but from the sweepers of Vṛndāvana, and when the leading Vaiṣṇavas marveled at it he answered, blissfully, that those sweepers were no mere sweepers at all. "They are always serving the dust of Vraja, therefore they are most fortunate. They are not mere sweepers; they are most fortunate munis and ṛṣis who took birth in outcaste families simply to serve the dust of Vraja-dhāma." To handle that dust all day long is the highest fortune, for it is the same dust that the cloud-dark Lord rolls in along the moonlit paths. And so the seeker's whole prayer rises into one trembling question: shall I, too, one day stand in Vṛndāvana and see with these very eyes the place where Her feet have been?