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Begin where every cry of the heart eventually arrives: at the feet. Not the face first, not the eyes, not the crown of flowers tousled by the night's playfulness, but the feet, the cool soles tinted with lac, the toes like a row of small unopened blossoms, the anklets gone quiet now in the hush of the bower. This is where the servant kneels. This is where the whole poem has been walking all along, and here it finally lowers its forehead to the dust.

Look, then, at who is already gathered there. The kiśorī-gaṇa, the host of young Vraja maidens, the budding girls of Barsānā and Yāvaṭa and Nandagrām, have made these feet their object of worship: caraṇāmbuje upāsya, the lotus feet to be adored. They do not adore from afar as the world adores a deity behind a curtain. They adore as handmaids adore, near enough to press these feet, to redden them with fresh lac, to fan them, to learn from them. O the fortune of those girls. To be one drop in that host, permitted only to carry the water for that service, would be a heaven beyond the heavens.

And then lift your eyes from the feet to the festival rising around Her. Bhāvotsava: a carnival of emotion, a continuous celebration of moods, joy and pique and longing and reunion turning like the spokes of a wheel that never stops. This festival is aparibhāvya, beyond conceiving, even for the mahadbhiḥ puruṣaiḥ, even for the great souls, the masters, the sages. Nārada himself, who travels the three worlds singing the Name, cannot enter here. Why? Because he carries the wrong heart for this grove. A consciousness shaped as a man, or shaped as a father, or shaped as a brother, or shaped as a servant of majesty, presses its face to the gate and finds the gate will not open to that shape. Jīva Gosvāmī is tender and exact about this in the Bhakti Sandarbha, that the worship saturated with Śrī Rādhā's līlā is the very topmost, and yet the rahasya-līlā, the secret play, cannot be touched by the senses moved by masculine feeling, nor by the moods of parent or child or awe-struck dependent, because those moods stand at cross-purposes to the one mood the grove is made of. Only the sakhī-heart, the maidservant's heart, slips through. This is not a wall built to wound the seeker. It is simply the truth that you must become small and feminine in devotion, become a handmaid, before the festival will so much as turn its face toward you.

See now the wonder the tradition lays open here, almost in a whisper. Even Her rivals worship Her. Of the four parties of Kṛṣṇa's heroines, two are openly favorable to Śrī Rādhā: the suhṛt-pakṣa, the friendly party, and the svapakṣa, Her very own; one party, the taṭastha, stands neutral; and one, the vipakṣa, the contrary ones, Candrāvalī and Śaibyā and Padmā, pull Kṛṣṇa away and stir Rādhā's māna, Her sweet wounded pride. And here is the secret. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Ujjvala Nīlamaṇi, that dvau svapakṣa-vipakṣau ca bhedāv eva rasa-pradau: of all the parties it is the own and the enemies' that yield the most rasa. So the inimical gopīs worship Rādhā more sweetly than even the neutral Bhadrā or the friendly Śyāmalā, because by snatching the Beloved for a while they make Rādhā's love blaze up many times brighter. Their very enmity is a kind of service, a fuel poured into the fire of Her rasa. It is rasa itself that has lifted a sakhī like Candrāvalī to a station seeming equal to Rādhā's, though Rādhā is, beyond all dispute, the supreme gopikā; and so the rival's worship becomes a thing extra special. Rūpa Gosvāmī sings it again in the same Ujjvala Nīlamaṇi, in the Harivallabhā, that śṛṅgāra-rasa, Kṛṣṇa's dear friend, has arranged the jealousy of Rādhā and Candrāvalī in their union for His pleasure and for the nourishing of the transcendental rasa; yet in separation that same friend reveals the two of them full of affection for one another after all. So whether they know it or not, whether they smile at Her or scheme against Her, every single gopī, visibly or invisibly, is worshipping Śrī Rādhā. The whole of Vraja, openly and secretly, bends toward those feet.

Now hold the last and dearest claim to the light, for it is bold and it is true. These feet are agādha-rasa-dhāmani: the abode of unfathomable rasa. And a careful heart might pause and ask: but the Veda itself sings that the feet of Viṣṇu are the wellspring of the highest nectar, viṣṇoḥ pade parama madhvaḥ utsaḥ: in the place of Viṣṇu there is a fountain of the supreme honey. How then do you dare call Rādhā's feet the deep abode of rasa? The answer is gentle and unanswerable. Yes, the Beloved's feet are nectar, but that nectar yields its taste only to love. The demons too saw those very feet, and saw nothing in them but terror, and fled, because they had no prema with which to taste. Jīva Gosvāmī seals it: kṛṣṇa-mādhuryasya premaika-svādyatvāt, Kṛṣṇa's sweetness is relishable by those alone who love Him. And who is the very source, the presiding goddess, of that love? Rādhā. She is prema-lakṣmī, the fortune of love itself, the spring from which the river that sweetens His feet flows out. Therefore Her feet are not less than the abode of rasa; they are deeper still, for they are the abode of the love by which all rasa is even tasted. The Veda's nectar and Her feet are not rivals. The nectar is sweet because She is its source.

So the servant, hiding nothing, lays the whole heart down. Hā Rādhe. This fallen girl has already sold her heart at Your feet; it is no longer hers to keep or to give again. What will become of her if You turn away? She does not ask for the festival, she does not ask to comprehend the bhāva that defeats the sages, she does not ask to stand beside the Beloved. She asks only for the vidhi, the very method, the daily ordered duty of service: teach me, ordain for me, the way to serve these feet. Madhura, let it be sweet. Ujjvala, let it be shining, lustrous with that bridal radiance the tradition calls madhurojjvala. Adhīśvarī, O most-capable Mistress, You who alone are able to bestow this service upon Your maidservants, You whom the tradition names the presiding goddess of love itself, I come to no one else but You. Make it my appointed work. Give the order, and I am Yours.