krishna leela · Day 154 · Week 22
Uddhava's Message
End of week twenty-two — and tonight a friend learns that the deepest devotion is not a thing you carry to someone, but the way you sit beside them.
Krishna sent him with a teaching in his mouth. The gopis answered with a silence in their eyes.
Krishna had not been in Vrindavan for many years. He had left as a boy to go to Mathura, and from Mathura to Dwarka, and Dwarka had grown around him until he was a king with cities and queens and councils. But the gopis of Vrindavan — the cowherd women who had grown up beside him, who had carried curds on their heads and run barefoot beside his flute — had never stopped waiting for him to come back.
They did not say so. They went on with their lives. They milked the cows. They washed their saris in the Yamuna. They sang the old songs in the evenings under the kadamba trees. But anyone who looked closely saw that a part of each of them lived a little further away than their bodies — somewhere down a forest path that Krishna had once walked.