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Picture a soul who has walked a long road. Behind him lie the houses he was born among, the faces of kin who called him by his given name, the table set with comfort, the heaped coins of a fortune any worldly heart would die to hold. He has turned from all of it. Not in bitterness, not in disgust, but the way one turns from a guttering lamp because the sun has risen at the far edge of the grove. Dūrāt, from afar, he has set it all aside: svajana, his own people; sukha, joy; artha-koṭi, the very crores of riches the world counts as the meaning of a life. And he has done more than this. He has stood in the great hall of the sādhanas, the sādhana-varas, the noblest disciplines the scriptures crown as best, and he has found in their splendid rooms no chamber where his heart can lie down. Ciraṁ nirāśaḥ: for a long, long while now, he has been emptied of hope in them. Empty not as a beggar is empty, but as a cup is empty when it has been turned over to wait for one particular rain.

For there is a rain. O hear it begin to fall. Varṣantam eva: it showers, it showers only, it never ceases. And what does it shower? Sahaja-adbhuta-saukhya-dhārāṁ, a stream of bliss that is at once natural and astonishing. Natural, sahaja, because there is not a whiff of prowess or majesty in it, not a thread of aiśvarya, no throne, no thunder, no power that makes a soul bow from fear. It is purely sweet, sweetness with nothing mixed in. And astonishing, adbhuta, not the wonder that frightens but the wonder that thrills, that runs through the body like the first cool drop on a summer noon and lifts every hair. This is the rain. And the cloud that pours it is not in the sky. It is the dust of Śrī Rādhikā's feet, the caraṇa-reṇu of the Daughter of Vṛṣabhānu, the fine soft dust that clings to the soles of Prāṇeśvarī as She walks Her lanes, the dust the lanes themselves count as their crown.

O dust of Her feet, you are the whole reason. For you he loosed the hands of his kinsmen. For you he let the fortune slide through his fingers like sand. For you he walked out of the great hall of the disciplines and never looked back. The tradition tells us in plain words: I remember Her foot-dust, that dust for which I gave up friends and relatives, the best of all practices, and every desire for wealth and personal happiness, gave them up forever. See how the giving-up and the remembering are one motion. He did not first renounce and then, having emptied his hands, go hunting for something to fill them. The fragrance of the foot-dust reached him from afar, dūrāt, and at its mere approach the whole world fell quietly away. The wealth did not have to be fought. It simply stopped mattering when the rain began to fall.

And consider whose hope this is, and how strong. Rūpa Gosvāmī teaches that one mark of a soul ripened into bhāva, into rati, is that he is bound fast by firm hope, hope that nothing can shake loose. Now the one who sings these words dwells, the tradition holds, in the very kingdom of mahā-bhāva, so high that we below cannot even imagine how strong his hopes have grown. This is not the empty hopelessness of despair. He is nirāśaḥ toward all else precisely because one single hope has captured him entirely, and it will not let him go.

And consider whose dust this is. There is a word from the Bhāgavata, spoken by Uddhava with folded hands before Śrī Kṛṣṇa, in the fourth chapter of the third canto: ko nv īśa te pāda-saroja-bhājāṁ, sudurlabho'rtheṣu caturṣv apīha; tathāpi nāhaṁ pravṛṇomi bhūman, bhavat-padāmbhoja-niṣevanotsukaḥ. O Lord, for those who serve Your lotus feet not one of the four goals of human life is hard to win, not dharma, not wealth, not pleasure, not even liberation; and yet, says Uddhava, I do not ask for any of them, for I am eager only to serve Your lotus feet. That is the heart of Kṛṣṇa's own devotee. But the one who sings these words is not even that. He is a maidservant of Śrīmatī Rādhārāṇī. He does not desire the four goals; he does not desire liberation; he does not even desire the direct service of Govinda Himself. His whole wealth has shrunk and swelled at once into a single grain: the dust beneath the feet of the Beloved of Kṛṣṇa. And when you have that grain, the spiritual world is sweet and the material world is sweet, Govinda is sweet and Rādhā is sweet. The old song of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta sings it: madhura hoite sumadhura, tāhā hoite sumadhura, sweeter than sweet, and sweeter than that again; and a single particle of that sweetness, āpanāra eka kaṇa, spreads through all three worlds and flows out in all ten directions.

Why dust? Why not the feet themselves, why not the face, the smile, the merciful glance? Because dust is what the lowest may touch. It is what lies beneath, where the most fallen servant kneels. The maidservant does not reach up to seize the hand of her mistress; she gathers the soft dust where her mistress has trod, and presses it to her brow. This is the genius of the longing here. It asks for the humblest thing, and the humblest thing turns out to be the rain-cloud of every joy. There is an old story the tradition keeps. An inquisitive soul came complaining to a great saint: I have taken the foot-dust of many great souls upon my body, yet love for God never came to me. The saint smiled a small smile and said: you smeared the dust upon your body, but you should smear it also upon your mind, and upon your heart. The one who sings these words made no such mistake. He says smarāmi: I remember. Not on the skin alone but in the deep chamber where remembrance lives. He takes the dust into the heart, and there it begins to rain.

And there is a tender second sense the tradition lets us hear in that one word, smarāmi. Perhaps he says I remember because remembrance is all that is given to him. Perhaps he cannot yet hold the foot-dust in his hand, cannot yet enter the loving service his whole being aches for. So he does the one thing love can always do from any distance: he remembers. He vows to remember Her foot-dust, to remember Her loving service, ceaselessly, and this, the tradition says, is the best of all spiritual practices. Look at the turn in this. He gave up all the celebrated sādhanas, found no rest in any of them, and the practice that remained, the practice that became everything, was simply this: to remember the dust of Her feet. The lowest discipline, the one a child could keep, the bare act of remembering, is revealed as the highest. And we should hear, too, how the Hit voice keeps it: there the speaker remembers as a woman, smaraṇa kartī hūṁ, the heart already wearing the maidservant's form. He stands now hopeless of all else and full of one immovable hope, the hope that this rain will never stop, the hope that one day the dust he remembers will be the dust he serves.