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Begin in the bower at the hour before He comes. The lamps are not yet lit; the flowers are not yet gathered into a bed; the kuñja waits, breathing, expectant. And into this waiting walks a girl who is also a Queen, a housewife who is also the secret of all the scriptures, and She sets about making a home for love. By Śrīmatī's own grace Śrīpāda is granted the vision before his love-anointed eyes: Śrī Rādhā as vāsaka-sajjikā, the heroine who, knowing with utter certainty that Her Beloved will come, decorates the place of meeting with Her own hands.

O Rādhe, see how You move. Your lovely hands gather the lovely blossoms and lay the lovely bed; You kindle the bright lamps so the bower glows; You fold the betel-leaves with camphor and set them ready for His mouth. Everything You touch becomes mañju, lovely, lovely, lovely, until the word itself seems to have been minted only to describe Your fingers at their work. This is why Śrīpāda sees You today as Vṛndāvana's mañju-gṛhiṇī, the lovely housewife of the grove, tending the kuñja as if it were Your own house. And still, O tender One, Your love will not let You rest. The bed is exquisite, the lamps are perfect, the offering is sweet, and yet Your loving ecstasy whispers that it is not yet done well enough, that nothing is good enough for the One who is coming. This dissatisfaction is not lack; it is love overflowing its own banks, love that can never feel it has loved enough.

And as You bend to Your loving labor, O Svāminī, something happens that You do not intend and cannot help. A wonderful golden luster gushes from Your beautiful form. It is the splendor of pure prema made visible, a beauty that is not of this world's gold and not of any earthly lamp. The tradition calls it lāvaṇyāmṛta-vārtā: the nectar-news, the nectarean words, of Your elegance; and the Rādhāvallabha singers name it the same, the saundarya-sudhā-vāṇī, the beauty-nectar-speech that pours from You. It does not stay inside the grove. It rises like a flood and pours out over the whole of creation, samplāvayantī, inundating all that is. What to speak of the rare and blessed soul who actually beholds this luster of pure love; even the one who merely hears of it, who catches only the rumor of it on the wind, is swept off his feet and drowned in the deluge of divine love. This is the strange mathematics of Vṛndāvana: the very report of Her beauty inundates hearts that the sight of Her has never reached.

Here the two streams of the world's waters meet and part. Outside, in the season of rains, the Gaṅgā swells and the Yamunā swells, and yet the tradition remembers, in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta of the Madhya-līlā, that even those great rivers could not drown Prayāga: gaṅgā yamunā prayāga nārilo ḍubāite; prabhu ḍubāilo kṛṣṇa-premera bonyāte. The Gaṅgā and Yamunā could not inundate Prayāga, but Mahāprabhu loosed a flood that drowned it. For Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu took upon Himself the very mood and the very golden luster of Śrīmatī Rādhikā, and the flood He loosed was not water but kṛṣṇa-prema, and that flood reached where no river can reach, into the inner core of every heart. The outer rivers fill the fields; this inner river fills the soul. That is the whole secret of why the golden Lord could do what Gaṅgā and Yamunā could not: because the luster He wore was Hers.

Now lift your eyes to Her face, O heart, and you will not find one moon but a sky full of them. From the moon-bright face of this Nāgarī-maṇi, this jewel among the cowherd-beauties, the rays go out and spread a radiance as lovely as innumerable autumn full moons, śarad-rākā-candra without end, anantam, each one whole, each one cool, each one without setting. Mark it well, O servant: this is not the moon of the night sky, not any material luminary that waxes and wanes. This is the divine light of passionate, transcendental love, and where it falls it does not merely brighten the eye but illumines the very heart and mind of the one who receives it. The maidservant, standing near, feels her own inward darkness lit from within by these autumn moons that pour from Her face.

And then, as such visions do, it is gone. The bower dissolves, the golden luster withdraws, the moons set, and the servant of Śrī Rūpa-Raghunātha is left standing in the after-ache of so much sweetness. Out of that ache rises the one cry this whole remembrance has been bending toward, the very lament of Śrīpāda: when, O when, will the lovely housewife of Vṛndāvana's bowers be merciful to me and bestow upon me the festival of Her service? Not Her beauty to possess, not Her grove to enter as a master, but Her dāsya, the chance to serve in that kuñja, to be one more pair of hands laying flowers for Her Beloved.

For this is the height the verse climbs to at the last, and it is the highest height there is. She makes the talk of all goals and all practices, akhila-sādhya-sādhana-kathā, suddenly small, tuccha, almost contemptibly slight, the very moment She grants the utsava of Her own service. Heaven grows pale, liberation grows pale, every disciplined ladder of attainment grows pale, because here is a joy beside which they are nothing. And how powerful, then, are the words of the ācāryas who are exclusively dedicated to Her lotus feet; each syllable crystallizes their feeling, until the syllables are no longer mere syllables but Her own vāṅmayī-mūrti, Her verbal form. The tradition does not leave this verdict as mere assertion; it remembers the long, rising conversation on the bank of the Godāvarī, set down in the eighth chapter of the Madhya-līlā, where Rāmānanda Rāya and Lord Caitanya climbed step by step through every goal a soul might seek and came at the summit to this: ihāra madhye rādhāra prema sādhya-śiromaṇi; yāhāra mahimā sarva-śāstrete vākhāni: among them all, the love of Rādhā is the crown-jewel of every goal of life, whose glory all the scriptures sing. So when this hidden Mistress of the bower turns and offers you a place in Her service, every other prize you ever wanted falls from your hands of its own accord, unmissed, forgotten, tuccha, beside the festival She gives.