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Begin on the bank of the Kālindī, where the dark water lies cool and unhurried under the leaves. There stands a kalpa-vṛkṣa, a tree that gives whatever the heart asks, and at its foot the grass is soft and the shade is deep. This is no ordinary arbour. It is the chosen place, the trysting bower, kālindī-kūla-kalpadruma-tala-nilayā, and beneath that wishing-tree She has Her abode. O Rādhe, of all the spreading green of Vṛndāvana, You have made this one shaded root Your home, and where You dwell the whole grove leans inward to attend You.

Look more closely and you will see that this is not merely where the love-play happens. She is its very root, prollasat-keli-kandā, the bulb from which every blossom of bright līlā rises. The flute-call that floats across the river; the bed of fresh flowers that Madhusūdana lays out with His own hands, by day, while He stares down the path and waits, eager for one shape to appear; the dancing that wheels through the autumn night until the very stars seem to slow: all of it springs from Her. The gopīs hear that flute and at once leave moral principle and family behind, slipping out to meet Him and to turn in the Rāsa. And cut down to the source of all this sweetness, and you find Her there, the kanda, the hidden root underground from which the visible joy grows. Krishna's pastimes are the flowering. Rādhā is what they grow out of.

And how is She found here? Vṛndāṭavyāṁ sadā prakaṭatara-rahaḥ: forever in Vṛndāvana, most manifest and yet in the most secret way. There is a hiddenness woven through Her glory, and it is a tender hiddenness, not a cold one. The vine-like cowherd-girls, the vallavīs, come to this bower in secret, slipping away from house and field at the sound of the flute. By Yogamāyā's own arrangement they are wed to other cowherders, so their coming is veiled, their love kept under leaves. The tradition is careful here, and sets the matter plainly. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, in the Kṛṣṇa-Vallabhā, that these gopīs, who once worshipped Kātyāyanī to win Krishna for a husband, were in truth accepted by Him in the gāndharva manner and are thus His very own wives, yet because the marriage stayed unknown to His parents and theirs, their conjugal love remained well hidden. So the union stays unspoken to the world, and the love keeps its quality of something stolen, something that must not be displayed. It is this very secrecy that keeps the rasa burning. What is hidden is not diminished. It is intensified.

She is raho-vallavī-bhāva-bhāvyā, adored through the inward mood of these secret cowherd-lovers. To meditate on Her is to borrow their feeling, to slip into the heart of one who waits for Her in the grove, who lives only to arrange Her meeting with Krishna, or to fan Her, or to braid the flowers into Her hair. The Rādhāvallabha singers name them with love: it is Lalitā and the others whose bhāva makes Her bhavyā, supremely lovely, the param-sundarī adorned by the very feeling of Her friends. And the Gauḍīyas count these lovers in their groups: svapakṣa, those of Her own party; vipakṣa, those of the rival side; suhṛt-pakṣa, the friendly ones; taṭastha-pakṣa, the neutral. Some serve Her openly and some serve unseen. But all of them, every one, worship Her, for without the touch of Her lotus feet their world goes dark. She is the lamp of the whole bower.

Now come to the tenderest line. Bhaktānāṁ hṛt-saroje madhura-rasa-sudhā-syandi-padāravindā: into the lotus of the devotee's heart, from Her lotus feet, a sweet nectar streams. Picture the heart opened like a water-lily on still water, and Her feet set down within it, and from those rosy soles a slow honeyed flow descending, drop after cool drop, sweet rasa and the nectar of the deathless, settling into the petals of the heart. The Rādhāvallabha word lingers here too: She installs Her two lotus feet in the devotee's heart-lotus and from them makes the nectar gush, a ceaseless falling. O these feet. They do not stay distant in some far heaven. They pour. The experienced devotee who sits in remembrance can feel that very stream begin to float toward the heart, a sweetness arriving from outside the self, unearned, given. And here is the wonder the tradition presses upon us: even Śrī Govinda Himself meditates on these feet to taste this stream. If the Lord of the grove leans His own heart toward Rādhā's feet to drink, then surely, certainly, we who love Her should sit at those feet and let the nectar fall.

She is sāndrānanda-ākṛtiḥ, the very shape of dense, packed, unthinned bliss, ānanda made solid and given a form, ghanībhūta-ānanda-mūrti, and that form is Hers. And She is amanda-prema-lakṣmī: the Lakṣmī, the goddess of fortune, but not of the reverential love that keeps its distance with folded hands like the Lakṣmī of Vaikuṇṭha. The tradition draws the line plainly, in the words of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, aiśvarya-jñānete hoy saṅkucita prīti: where the knowledge of majesty enters, the spontaneous flood of love shrinks back; reverence dims the fire. Rādhā is the fortune of the love that does not shrink, the love that runs forward without calculation, the love that forgets to be careful. And this fortune is nava-nava, ever-new, never once the same, never stale, renewing itself fresh in every instant like the first morning of the world; and amanda, great and undimmed.

So the whole verse gathers into a single cry: sphuratu naḥ, may She arise in us, may She become manifest. Prabodhānanda, the tradition tells, prays it as his own: may that amanda-prema-lakṣmī, the goddess of fortune of sweet ecstatic love, be ever manifest in this heart. Not some smaller fortune. Not wealth, not heaven, not even reverent communion. This: the great undimmed one, the prema-lakṣmī of the secret bower at the foot of the wishing-tree on the Yamunā's bank. And the tradition warns us first that Her prema-rasa cannot be told in words, and could not be grasped by worldly hearts without sādhanā; yet even the syllables that praise Her carry a power to astonish, so that one relishes it just so far as one is pure and sincere. We do not ask to understand You, O Rādhe. We ask only that You rise within these poor hearts and pour, and pour, and never fade.