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Begin with the ache of the question, for this is one long cry: how, how can I become Her maidservant? Śrīpāda stands on the soil of Vṛndāvana with empty hands, and he asks rather than demands. He has been given a little hope, and he knows exactly where it came from. It was not earned by his worth. It was poured into him by the mercy of the holy ground itself.

For this is how Vṛndāvana-dhāma blesses the fallen. The tradition reads the hope plainly in his heart: "If I can lay down this material body here in Vṛndāvana, my mind fixed on the loving play of playful Śrī Rādhā and of Kṛṣṇa, the greatest relisher of all, then surely the door opens, surely I can become Śrī Rādhā's own dāsī. This is the kindness of the land toward souls as lowly as I am." So the longing is not a grasping. It is a hope handed to him by the very place where Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa play.

And there is a reason the ground is so merciful. Rādhā and Rasika-maṇi, the jewel of relishers, look upon every great soul who vows to remain in Vraja until death and count that one already among Their own servants, and They are deeply pleased. The tradition fixes this in the Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta, that beautiful hymn to the dhāma: when someone vows to live until his last breath in lovely Vṛndāvana, the fountainhead of all great delight, Śrī Gāndharvā, who is Rādhā, and Rasika-tilaka, who is Kṛṣṇa, turn to one another and say, "Aha, how dear this person is to Us!" And so Śrīpāda's whole resolve narrows to a single practical prayer: let me only find the way to stay in Vraja until I die, my heart never leaving the meditation on Rādhā and Her rasika-tilaka.

Now watch what happens as that hope lights his heart. By the light of Vraja's glories he becomes aware of another glory, the glory of Rādhikā's maidservants, and his longing finds its true shape in them. For look at what they are. They live so near the lotus feet of Śrī Rādhā that they have reached the very limit, the sīmā, of the sweet fragrance of those feet. It is as if they no longer merely carry that fragrance; they have become it, become the embodiment of that āmoda and mādhurya. And here is the wonder: it is exactly this fragrance that draws the thirsty Kṛṣṇa-bee, ever circling, ever seeking, and blesses Him with the honey of sweet love. The sweetness that maddens Him flows up from Her feet through the very being of Her servants.

Behold, then, the glory of Rādhikā's maidservants. They are embodiments of love, made of prema just as She is. They are skilled in every tender art of love, expert just as She is. To be near Her is much; to be one of these, to be made of Her fragrance and to be the channel by which Kṛṣṇa drinks Her honey, is the whole of Śrīpāda's wish. And so his own heart has turned bee-like at last, no longer roaming, but settled and drowned in the honey that streams forever from Śrī Rādhikā's lotus feet.

This is why he names Her as he does. She is nava-rasa-kala-komala-prema-mūrti: love itself given a body, tender, fresh in every flavor, delicate in the very art of feeling. And Her feet are the place where He whom all the worlds call sweet is Himself overcome by sweetness, where fragrance has no further to go. O Rādhe, let this body fall here, at the edge of that fragrance, and let it rise again as one small servant of Yours.