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Begin with the lightning. Picture the deep monsoon sky over Vraja, blue-black and heavy with rain, and across it a single arc of lightning unfurling like a golden creeper, a taḍit-latā, a vine of pure fire writing itself against the dark. That sudden gold against that depthless blue is the whole of the universe folded into one image, for the dark is Śyāma and the gold is Rādhā, and you cannot tell anymore where the seeing ends and the adoring begins. This is how the tradition asks us to first behold Her: not as a girl standing in a garden, but as light. Effulgence with a form. A radiance so saturated with anurāga, with constant unbroken love, that the love has taken a body, and the body is made of nothing but love.

O Rādhe, You are pūrṇānurāga-rasa-mūrti, the very enshrined form of complete love-rasa. Everything that touches You becomes love the way everything that falls into the salt sea becomes salt; this is the lavaṇākāra-nyāya, the logic of the salt ocean, and by it Your garments are woven of prema, Your sandal-paste is prema, every ornament at Your wrist and throat is transcendental affection given shape. Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī sings it exactly so, mahā-bhāvojjvalā cintā-ratnodbhāvita-vigrahām: Your very form is fashioned from the blazing thought-gem of mahā-bhāva, the highest, most luminous pitch of love condensed into a body. And so You are called Kṛṣṇamayī, as the Caitanya-caritāmṛta teaches in its fourth chapter, kṛṣṇa-mayi kṛṣṇa yāra antare bahire, yāhā yāhā netra poḍe tāhā kṛṣṇa sphure: Kṛṣṇa is within You and without You, and wherever Your eyes fall, there You behold Him. You are made of Him, and He, we are about to learn, longs to be made of You.

Now hold the strange and trembling heart of this verse. It does not merely say that the devotee loves Rādhā. It says She is bhagavato ratimad-rahasyam, the secret beloved of the Lord Himself. Sit with that. Kṛṣṇa is Bhagavān, the complete one, full of all six opulences, lacking nothing, the source from whom every sweetness flows. The dictionary fixes it, bhaga śrī kāma māhātmye, that the very word bhaga means beauty, desire, greatness, so Bhagavān is the most beautiful of all beings. And yet this most beautiful, most complete one is not complete in His own enjoyment until He drinks the rasa of Rādhā's beauty. His sweetness and prowess are unrivalled, His sweetness rests on the firm ground of tattva and of aiśvarya, and still He stands enchanted by Hers. When He turns and beholds Her golden effulgence, ānanda showers down upon the very fountain of ānanda. Bilvamaṅgala Ṭhākura in the Kṛṣṇa-Karṇāmṛta loved to sing of Kṛṣṇa as a jyoti, a luminous form that sometimes smiles and sometimes wears a peacock feather, a light with a body. Yet this lightning-vine of Rādhā's full passionate love enchants even that light. Rūpa Gosvāmī heard the dark Lord cry it aloud in the Ujjvala-Nīlamani, vidhūnayati rādhike! trijagad eva rūpotsavaḥ: O Rādhe, the festival of Your form makes Me tremble along with all the three worlds. O wonder past all wonder, that the One who has everything should stand wanting, that fullness itself should yearn. Here is the secret folded inside the very word God.

And because of this She bears one of Her sweetest names twice over. Arjuna says in the Gītā, sarvaṁ samāpnosi tato'si sarvaḥ, that because Kṛṣṇa pervades everything He is called sarva, He is called viśva, the whole world. So when Rādhā is named viśvamohinī it carries two truths at once: in its majestic aspect She is the enchantress of the world, but in its sweet aspect She is the enchanter of Kṛṣṇa Himself, who is that very world. The bewilderer of all is bewildered by Her.

And She is rahasya, secret, in a deeper way still. The Śrīmad-Bhāgavata tells how Śuka Muni, the king of sages, when he came to narrate the Rāsa-līlā, would not speak Her name aloud. Jīva Gosvāmī opens his heart for us in the Laghu-Toṣaṇī, glossing the verse apy-eṇa-patny-upagata-priyayā, that when Bhagavān slipped away from the dance taking one gopī with Him, Śukadeva did not directly say who she was. He confided to himself: of all the advents of God my love rests on Śrī Kṛṣṇa, and of all His associates on the people of Vraja, and of all the people of Vraja on the gopīs, and of all the gopīs on one greater still, on Śrī Rādhikā. Yet his heart hesitated to reveal Her topmost intimacy directly. To name it felt too sacred to utter; to hide it entirely felt like withholding a treasure the world deserved. So he let Her glory shine sideways, through the mouths of Her girlfriends, and even through the mouths of Her rivals, so that no one could call it mere partiality. He scattered Her praise like light through a lattice, and though in his ecstasy he might reveal all manner of things, Her holy name itself he kept forever veiled. This is why She is the great mysterious secret. The whole of revelation circles Her and will not say Her name out loud.

O Rādhe, and here is the mercy that breaks the heart open. You who are this hidden, unsearchable, supreme secret, You did not stay hidden. The Lord told Arjuna at the very end of the Gītā that surrender to Him is sarva-guhyatamam, the most confidential of all secrets, and the fruit of that surrender is love of God, and the essence of that love is mahā-bhāva, and the Caitanya-caritāmṛta seals it, sei mahā-bhāva-svarūpā rādhā ṭhākurāṇī, Śrī Rādhā is the very form of mahā-bhāva. The deepest secret of all scripture became a girl in a house in Vraja. You appeared, kṛpayā vṛṣabhānu-gehe, by Your own mercy in the home of Mahārāja Vṛṣabhānu, the lightning come down to earth, the unsearchable made findable, the festival of love walking on small feet through Your father's courtyard. Had You not come, the tradition tells us, You would have remained forever an undiscoverable secret, and the world would never have known there was such a thing to long for. You descended out of sheer compassion, so that we, the lost ones, might come to know You exist and might dare to want You.

And so what does the singer ask, having beheld all this. Not to possess that lightning. Not to be Her equal, nor even Her companion. He asks only this, syāt kiṅkarī bhavitum eva mamābhilāṣaḥ, may it be my one desire only to become a maidservant. Hear the humility, how it trembles and how it is wise. Śrīpāda cries it anxiously, and he does not even claim he will attain the service; he prays only to carry the longing. For the tradition holds that even if this longing alone is held in the heart at the very hour of death, that bare desire ripens and bears its fruit. So small a prayer, so vast a hope. He folds himself down beneath Her sandalled feet and asks only to be allowed to want to serve there: to carry water, to braid flowers, to bring the cup, to stand at the edge of the bower waiting to be of use. The supreme secret of all the Vedas, and his whole ambition is to be Her handmaid, even, as one reading of the verse breathes it, a kiṅkarī among Her own sakhīs.

O Rādhe, give this poor maiden a single drop of that same mercy that urged You down into Vṛṣabhānu's home. You came for the world's sake. Let the world's least servant be enrolled, even now, in the longing to serve You.