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Begin on the bank of the Yamunā, where the dark water slides past the reeds and the bowers lean low over the sand. Picture a single kuñja there, screened in vine and blossom, and let your whole heart move into it and settle, for this is where Śrīpāda's prayer wants to live. He is not asking for anything his hands can hold. He is asking for the day his mind will sit down in that grove and wait, quietly, upon Śrī Rādhā and Her beloved.

And see what fills that bower. From the very soles of Rādhā's feet, rādhā-pādāravinda, there streams up a fresh nectar, nava-rasa-prema-pīyūṣa, an abundance of it, puñje, flooding the grove without pause and without end. It is into that flood that the heart sinks, accepting there a mood, mahā-udāra-mādhurya-bhāva: a mood very great, very generous, very sweet. Hold that word generous close, for the tradition makes it a key. Mahodāra, the Gauḍīya teachers gloss, names that pure love which is free of every trace of desire for one's own sense pleasure, love that wants nothing back for itself. And they promise that the one who serves Rādhā and Mādhava with love so clean is slowly purified, until one day he wakes to his own siddha-svarūpa, his real and eternal transcendental self, hidden now but never lost.

Now lift your eyes to Her whom he longs to serve. She walks the lovely pathways, śrī-vṛndāraṇya-vīthī, of Vṛndāvana's woodland, and She is the nāgarī, the heroine expert in all the arts of love, rati-kalā. She is garīyaḥ, the great one, most worshipful. And here is Her mystery: She is gambhīra, grave and deep as a million oceans, yet She carries eka-anurāga, one single undivided passion, and that gravity and that fire live in Her together. The Rādhāvallabha singers, gazing at the same line, call Her exactly this: the one and only image of an incomparable and grave anurāga, atula and gambhīra at once.

Watch what that gravity does. Deep as oceans though She is, Śrīmatī rises and goes out, passionately, to meet Śyāma in the grove on the Yamunā's bank, Her maidservant following behind. She turns Her glance everywhere, searching, Her heart asking, "Where is My Prāṇanātha? Where is the Lord of My life?", and wherever that searching glance falls it beautifies the whole of Vṛndāvana. Then Madhusūdana, the rasika bee, catches the fragrance of Nāgarī-maṇi, the jewel of heroines, and drawn helplessly He comes to Her along the forest-path. And grave Rādhikā, meeting Him, shows signs of refusal. Do not read this as coldness; the tradition reads it as art. Her little opposition gives Her hero a relish past speaking, for it only swells His amorous eagerness the more. And in that play the whole kuñja is drowned, inundated by the flood of Śrī Rādhā's prema-rasa, as with Her artful love She gives Her beloved an ecstasy no words can carry.

It is to stand inside that flood, in his mind, that Śrīpāda prays. And the Rādhāvallabha voice catches the prayer in its most tender register, speaking now in the feminine, as one of Her own maidservants would. First the heart simply marvels: "How beautiful, this bank of the Yamunā, marked by Śrī Rādhā's lotus-feet, heaped with the nectar of ever-fresh love-rasa! And on that bank, seated, I, my heart full of a feeling so beautiful, so generous, so sweet?" Then she names the feeling: I, made clever in the lovely arts on the bowered paths of Vṛndāvana, and this mānasī-sevā, this attendance rendered to Śrī Svāminī-jī in the mind alone. And then the longing doubles back on itself, almost breaking: "And what will come of it? What will come! When, O when, shall I be so filled with this one feeling that I forget all else?"

Here the Gauḍīya teachers steady the longing with a sober word, for the prayer is for inward service and that road has two lanes, not one. Rāgānugā practice, they say, citing the Caitanya Caritāmṛta in its twenty-second chapter of the Madhya, is of two kinds: external, bāhya, and internal, antara. Externally one hears and chants, śravaṇa-kīrtana, with this ordinary body; internally one dwells in one's siddha-deha, one's spiritual body, serving Kṛṣṇa in Vraja day and night. And though smaraṇa, this loving remembrance of the pastimes and of one's own service within them, is the very main limb of rāgānugā bhakti, still the outer hearing and chanting must never be cast off. The two feed one another: the hearing and singing nourish the inner remembrance, and the inner remembrance nourishes the hearing and singing. To drop the outer practice before its time, keeping only the mental service, will not succeed; rather the mind dries up and grows contaminated with thoughts of the senses. Both, therefore, must go on together. This is why the teachers hold this very verse up as a brilliant model for every practitioner of rāgānugā bhakti: not a shortcut around practice, but its ripe and fragrant fruit. For though Rādhā and Mādhava play their pastimes eternally in sweet Vṛndāvana-dhāma, that play is not visible to the eyes of the ordinary man; it opens only to the heart made clean by such service. So Śrīpāda thinks: when will I be so fortunate that I may serve that sweet romantic Pair, mentally, in the bushes on the bank of the Yamunā?