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Take a heart, any heart, and then go looking for the heart of that heart. Travel inward past every sweetness you have ever tasted, past the first faint stirring of love, past the rising tide of devotion, all the way down to the still warm center where love itself is kept alive. There, O seeker, the tradition tells you, you will find Her. She is not one beloved among many. She is the hidden inner chamber from which love is born and out of which it pours, true and sweet and luminous all in one breath. Premṇaḥ san-madhurojjvalasya hṛdayam: the heart of that radiant, honeyed, faithful love is Rādhā Herself, the prāṇa-svarūpā, the very life-form of prema.

O Rādhe, what shall a servant call You? When the heart tries to name You, the words bend backward in wonder. You are the farthest limit of every art of love, paramāvadhi, the place where amorous play, śṛṅgāra-līlā-kalā-vaicitrī, reaches its uttermost variegated edge and can climb no higher. Where līlā longs to deepen, it deepens toward You. Where rasa longs to grow more wondrous, it grows toward You and then stops, astonished, because there is nowhere further to go. The arts of the heart spend themselves trying to reach the wonder that You simply are; You are the supreme boundary at which astonishment itself comes to rest.

And here the tongue trembles to say what the tradition dares to say: pūjyaiva, bhagavataḥ. You are worshipped, and worshipped even by Bhagavān. The One whom every world adores turns and adores You. The Lord of Vṛndāvana, the object of all prayer, makes of Himself a worshipper before this nameless, indescribable Mistress of love. How can the worshipped Himself have a worshipped One? Only here, only in this love, where Kṛṣṇa lays down His own lordship and lifts Rādhā up as the very thing He cannot help but cherish. The tradition is bolder still: kāpi-īśatā, some woman who is the very controller of the Lord, She by whose word He moves. The arrow of all worship, which everywhere else flies toward Him, here flies past Him and lodges in Her.

O seeker, weigh now what is set before you. Īśānī ca śacī, mahā-sukha-tanuḥ. Goddess Pārvatī, Īśānī, Durgā, consort of Śiva, mistress of the cosmos and its dissolving; Śacī, queen of the gods at Indra's side; these blazing goddesses are not Her rivals. They are Her sparks, droplets of Her splendor, energies flowing from one source. When you bow before the great Goddesses, the tradition whispers that you are bowing, all unknowing, toward Her. And She is mahā-sukha-tanuḥ, great bliss with a body, sukha taken form; She is the supreme Śakti, parā, who is svatantrā, utterly independent, answering to no command. Every other power in existence is wielded, set in motion, governed by another. She alone is the highest, the power that moves of itself and is moved by no other. Even when She yields to Kṛṣṇa, She yields freely, by the sovereignty of love and never by compulsion. That is the strange royalty of the One who serves love and rules it in a single breath.

Now lift your eyes to the throne. Śrī-vṛndāvana-nātha-paṭṭa-mahiṣī. Paṭṭa means the throne, and paṭṭa-mahiṣī means the crowned, enthroned Queen, the chief consort lawfully installed at the king's side. In the worldly reckoning that title belongs to Rukmiṇī, married with every rite in Dvārakā, seated beside Kṛṣṇa the king, qualified to occupy the royal throne. But the tradition will not let the eye rest there. Śrīpāda takes that very title, paṭṭa-mahiṣī, and lays it upon the sweet brilliant loving Queen of Vṛndāvana, the paṭrānī of Śrī Lāljī, the Lord of the forest. The Padma Purāṇa tells how Kṛṣṇa, overcome by Rādhikā's matchless sweetness, gave Vṛndāvana itself into Her keeping, vṛndāvanādhipatyaṁ ca dattaṁ tasyai: He poured the kingdom of the forest into Her hands and made Her its sovereign. Rūpa Gosvāmī sang of Her coronation, anointing Her in the matchless splendor of the realm of Vṛndāvana, atula-mahasi vṛndāraṇya-rājye 'bhiṣiktam, and among Her hundred and eight names he set rādhā kṛṣṇa-vanādhīśā, the empress of Kṛṣṇa's forest. The tradition records that the same coronation is touched again and again by the Gosvāmīs in song, and that when Rūpa's heart was still not satisfied, he set Jīva Gosvāmī to write a whole book in celebration of Her festival as Queen, the Mādhava-mahotsava. So the throne here is no throne of marble and cold crown. It is the throne at the heart of the forest, and the Queen upon it is the One whom even the King adores.

Why does the heart lean here, toward the forest Queen, and not toward the lawful queens of the city? The tradition answers gently and without scorn. There is a love that gives everything and keeps nothing back, a love willing to bear the keenest grief and to call that grief itself sweetness, because it is for His pleasure. Śrī Caitanya teaches in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, parakīya bhāve ati rasera ullāsa, vraja vinā ihāra anyatra nāhi vāsa: the parakīya mood holds the most flavor and joy, and it dwells nowhere but in Vraja. The tradition records that though the gopīs are married to cowherds they forever yearn for union with Kṛṣṇa, ever-adolescent heroines whose love is the love of the unattainable; and that Yogamāyā, who makes the impossible possible, has arranged these very marriages, these obstacles, on purpose, for without the danger and the secrecy the gopīs could never rise to mahā-bhāva. Jīva Gosvāmī teaches that to accept the greatest misery for Kṛṣṇa's joy and to taste that misery as bliss is rāga itself; for a chaste wife it is easier to leap into fire and embrace death than to step from the path of honor, yet for the maidens of Vraja the giving up of all reckoning, all reputation, all safety comes easily when it is for Kṛṣṇa. That is why their love climbs to mahā-bhāva, the summit of all love, a height the enthroned queens of Dvārakā cannot reach. The danger, the secrecy, the impossibility are not flaws in this love but the very furnace in which it is purified into gold.

And so the heart of the worshipper makes its quiet, total vow. Rādhaiva sevyā mama. Not many objects of devotion, not a divided allegiance, but She, and She alone, is mine to serve. The Gauḍīya teachers warn that the moment a soul tastes even a little of Her service, the heart wants nothing else ever again. And they warn too of the cost of forgetting. Lord Brahmā prayed in the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, tāvad rāgādayas tenas tāvat kārāgṛhaṁ gṛham, tāvan moho 'ṅghri nigaḍo yāvat kṛṣṇa na te janaḥ: O Kṛṣṇa, as long as people are not Yours, their very attachments act on them like thieves, their homes become prisons, their illusions become chains. The tradition unfolds it: You, O Lord, are the abode of everyone's causeless love, the Self of selves, the most worthy shelter of all love; and when a soul wanders looking for You and does not find its own Master to love, that love turns thief and steals away its holy desires and the very items of its worship, and greed and illusion follow at its heels. The cure for the thieving heart is here, at these feet: a love that has finally found its true Mistress and so has nothing left to steal it away. O fortunate seeker, stand before this whole ocean of nectar and do not carry home a single drop and call it enough.