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Picture the wanderer walking the dust of Vraja, hour after hour, day after day, his Svāminī long out of sight. He is not a tourist of holy places; he is a maidservant parted from her mistress, and every step is taken in the ache of that parting. Then the grove rises before him, and his breath catches. "Aho! O Queen of my heart, these, these are the very kuñjas where Your sweet pastimes forever take place." He turns, and there is the open ground. "This, this is that incomparable ground of the Rāsa, the tad-anupama-rāsa-sthalam, the matchless arena where You astonish Your Rāsa-rasika, the very relisher of the dance, by circling with Him on the strength of Your millions of girlfriends, the one place where the sweetness of Your love and the sweetness of Your līlā stand revealed to their very limit." He lifts his eyes to the hill and there is the cleft of the rock, the giri-droṇī, the cave of Govardhana, that hill the Hindi reading names so tenderly as rati-rajju-praṇayinī, the hill in love with the binding cords of love's play, where the rati-raṅga unfolds. The bank of the Yamunā is here. Vṛndāvana is here. The full moon is poised in the sky as if the night itself were holding its breath for the dance. The Rāsa-līlā is eternal; it is happening here, now, always.

And he cannot see it. He cannot see Her. "Na vīkṣe śrī-rādhāṁ kuto'pi": I do not see Śrī Rādhā anywhere. Hari! Hari! Hā! Hā! The fuller the place, the emptier his eyes. The very stones that should console him hollow him out, for they remember Her perfectly and he cannot. "Alas," he cries, "the divine pastimes go on here forever, so why does everything look so empty to me? Nothing can fill this void. Nothing but the sight of Your lotus feet can pour back into this emptiness."

O Rādhe, do not let him think this emptiness a defeat. The old teachers say plainly that this very feeling of emptiness is a ripened stage of prema, the milk of love gone to cream. They remind him that even You, Prāṇeśvarī, taste this emptiness when You are parted from Govinda, for the song confesses it of Your own mood: śūna bhelo mandira, śūna bhelo nagarī, śūna bhelo daśa diśa, śūna bhelo sagarī, empty are the houses, empty the villages, empty the ten directions, empty everything. And Śrīman Mahāprabhu, who took on Your very heart, cried the same in His own anguish: govinda virahe śūnya hoilo tribhuvana; tuṣānale poḍe yeno nā yāy jīvana, the three worlds are emptied when I am torn from Govinda, and though I burn in a slow fire of straw, my life will not leave me. So the wanderer's hollowing is no failure. It is the shape You leave behind.

This, the teachers say, is the very reason a seeker should ever come to Vṛndāvana: to learn this emptiness. Sanātana Gosvāmī sets it down in the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, that when Nārada Muni wished to send Gopa Kumāra onward from the upper Dvārakā to Puruṣottama Kṣetra, it was Uddhava himself who begged that the boy be sent instead to the earthly Vraja, precisely so that he might taste its emptiness. For Sanātana tells us there how it works (Bṛ. Bhāg. 2.5.242-243): in that land humility is born, dainya, and from humility prema rises, and that prema makes a man see the forests and rivers and mountains of Vraja as though they were empty, so that his mouth is overrun with "Hā! Hā!" and his heart is scorched with a great anguish as he searches everywhere for his beloved.

And then the wanderer turns the blade upon himself, as a true lover does. "Alas," he says, "a wretch like me may live in Vraja, this very empty kingdom, and yet feel nothing, because I am sunk in body-consciousness and crawling after profit, after praise, after the little crown of being thought distinguished. That I feel no emptiness must be the fruit of offenses I have committed against the great saints. I should be ashamed of myself." So his prayer holds two fires at once: a longing fierce enough to split the heart, and a shame that the longing is still far too small.

He comes to the foot of Girirāja Govardhana, and there the gopīs' own words from the Śrīmad-Bhāgavata rise in him (10.21.18): hantāyam adrir abalā hari-dāsa-varyaḥ, friends, this mountain is the best of Hari's servants, for delighted by the touch of Rāma's and Kṛṣṇa's feet he honors Them and Their cows with cool water and luscious grass, with the shade of his caves and with sweet fruits and roots. And the wanderer thinks: how many hundreds of intimate pastimes must Rādhā and Mādhava be playing here this very moment, and by Mānasī-Gaṅgā, by Rādhā-kuṇḍa, by Śyāma-kuṇḍa, and I, blinded by māyā, cannot catch even one. So too he laments at Nandīśvara Giri, at Yāvaṭa, at every pastime-place his feet carry him to. "Can I find my beloved Couple nowhere? O Queen of my life, if I cannot see You, my heart will burst into a hundred pieces. Why has the Creator built this body at all, if only to bear this intolerable pain of separation? O Īśvarī, kadā, when, oh when, will my heart at last burst into its hundred pieces?" And his tender body, slender as a vine, goes on burning in the forest-fire of separation from his Svāminī, a fire that simply does not belong to this material world.

This was the very life of the six Gosvāmīs, who walked Vraja in exactly this mood, as Śrīnivāsācārya sings of them: he rādhe vraja-devike ca lalite he nanda-sūno kutaḥ, śrī-govardhana-kalpa-pādapa-tale kālindī-vanye kutaḥ, they were crying out everywhere across Vraja, "O Rādhe! O Goddess of Vraja! O Lalitā! O son of Nanda! Where are You? At the foot of some wish-fulfilling tree near Govardhana, or in the forest by the Yamunā? Where, oh where?" I bow, he says, to Rūpa and Sanātana, to the two Raghunāthas, to Śrī Jīva and Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, vande rūpa-sanātanau raghu-yugau śrī-jīva-gopālakau. This is the very best example for devotees of how one is to live in Vraja: for the hard heart of the seeker melts only when it is held to this fire of separation, and out of that melting, at last, the soul is blessed with prema.