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No scene rises first here, only the bare cry of the heart, for a soul speaks plainly of its single desire. There is one kneeling at the edge of the grove, and it asks for nothing the world counts as worth having. Not heaven, not liberation, not the wealth of all the worlds. It asks only to be a servant. It asks to hold a small cup of betel and to wait until it is useful. And it confesses, trembling, that even this lowest place is set so high that the very gods strain upward to glimpse it.

Picture, O heart, what this servant is reaching toward. The Gauḍīya teachers, in the Ananta Dāsa Bābājī lineage, let us into Śrīpāda's own meditation, that when the divine Couple unfolds Its hundreds of delicious artful plays, this maidservant will be called to fulfill Their every desire. So the kīrtana sings it: rati-raṇe śrama-yuta nāgarī nāgara: when Nāgarī and Nāgara are wearied from the battle of love, the maidservant comes near and fills Their mouths with cool tāmbūla, the fragrant betel-leaf. And then, malayaja kuṅkuma, mṛgamada karpūra, militahi gāta lāgāya: she takes sandal-paste ground fine, and vermilion, and musk, and camphor, and with her own hands she anoints Their spent and tender limbs. This is the whole of her ambition. Not to be loved as a queen is loved, not to be sung of, not to be remembered. Only to soothe the two of Them when They are weary, and then to vanish again into the green shadow of the kuñja.

Look closely, O heart, at why this is named astonishing. The world measures greatness by what is grasped; here greatness is measured by what is given away. Aparūpa priya-sakhī prema, the kīrtana cries: how wonderful is the love of the dear girlfriends. Nija prāṇa koṭi dei niramañchai, nāha tula lākho bāṇa hema: they wave their very lives in offering before the Couple, hearts purer than gold melted and re-melted a hundred-thousand times, and they keep nothing back. The soul that watches this can only stammer aparūpa, how wonderful, a love I cannot measure, a love that pours itself out and asks for no return. And watching, the soul wants in. Not to be served, but to serve those who serve. So it pleads as Śrīpāda pleads: O Rādhe, O young ladylove of the arbours, take me to Your lotus-feet; I sit here, I will not move, hoping only for the nectar of Your maidservice.

And though this service is among the rarest treasures in all the worlds, almost never attained, still Śrīpāda cannot give up hoping. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes this very thing for us: that such a strong, unkillable hope is itself a sign of jāta-rati, of bhāva-bhakti come awake, and that it is kindled by nothing other than the extraordinary sweetness of Śrīmatī's form, Her qualities, Her play. So even the longing is Her gift, the first dawn-light of love stirring in the dark.

Now see who stands outside the door, pressing their faces to the wonder of it. Lakṣmī herself, the queen of Vaikuṇṭha, mistress of all fortune, she who rests upon the chest of Nārāyaṇa. She rose from that eternal resting-place and came down into Vṛndāvana and undertook harsh austerities, longing to enter the Rāsa and to love Kṛṣṇa in the free, reckless way the gopīs love Him. The Bhāgavata marks her longing (10.16.36). And the tradition tells us, gently and without scorn, that her desire is still unfulfilled, that she stands yet upon her vow and has not returned home to Vaikuṇṭha, because she could not lay down her queenly dignity and put on the abandon of a cowherd girl. O Lakṣmī, even you wait at the threshold of this love. What then is this place the kneeling servant dares to ask for?

And if the goddess of fortune waits outside, hear the queen who is within. Even Rukmiṇī, Kṛṣṇa's own chief queen in golden Dvārakā, lifts the gopīs above herself. The Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta records her saying that the gopīs gave up husbands and children and every hope for this life and the next, and came to Him through the great love-festival of the Rāsa, and that the love they won there is the very thing we queens hold as the object of our highest meditation. The wives of Kṛṣṇa dream of being the gopīs. Sit with that, O heart: the ones who possess Him long to be the ones who only serve Him in the night-grove.

Then there is Śuka, the great sage whose love overflowed when he sang the Rāsa-līlā into the Bhāgavata, his every word soaked through with a tenderness the wise have pondered for ages; Jīva Gosvāmī himself draws it out in the Laghu-Toṣaṇī upon the verse apy eṇa-patny upagata (10.30.11). And there is Nārada, who out of great love bathed in his own Nārada-kuṇḍa, near Kusuma-sarovara between Rādhā-kuṇḍa and Govardhana, praying to be given the form of a gopī, so that he might at last stand in the Divine Couple's presence and taste the sweetness of that love from the inside. And the small word ādi, "and others," opens the door wider still, to Uddhava, the neutral friend who came to Vraja in a mixed mood of friendship and servanthood and was undone by what he found, whose praises of the gopīs are written in the Bhāgavata, in the tenth Canto's forty-seventh chapter, in golden letters; no one but he has so brightly made the victory-flag of the gopīs' love flutter in the sky. Sages, friends, goddesses, queens, the most exalted souls in all the worlds, and every one of them gazing up the same slope, toward the same green door.

And here is the marrow of it, the purport the tradition presses upon us: the gopīs themselves attained their great love by the mercy of Śrīmatī Rādhārāṇī, and those who attain Her own personal service, mañjarī-bhāva, must be counted especially blessed. This maidservice is not seized by austerity, not earned by merit, not bought by sacrifice. It is given. It falls only where Her glance falls. So the servant does not strive upward toward Kṛṣṇa; the servant turns, and looks at Her, and waits.

That is why the whole cry of the soul resolves into one trembling question. Not "let me reach You," but "when will You give." O Śrī Rādhe, navakuñja-nāgarī, ladylove of the ever-new bowers, You who hold the only key. I am poor and I have no claim. I have raised no mountain of merit that could compel You. But I am holding on, dhṛtāśe, I am sitting at Your lotus-feet and I will not stop hoping, for the hope itself is the only wealth I own. And so I ask the one question worth asking: kṛpā-dṛṣṭiṁ kadā dāsyasi, when, O Rādhe, when will You let Your merciful eyes rest on me, and make me, at last, a servant in Your grove?